Index Of The Blog
Hire The Best Web Designer
Are you in need of a top web designer who can come on board right now?
Perhaps you’ve just launched your business or a new product line. That means you have to quickly extend your customer base and strengthen your brand. With attention spans shrinking and the shelf-life of brands rapidly getting shorter, unless you step in soon with an effective, attractive, and strong message, you could find yourself lagging behind in the race.
Finding the best web designer at short notice is a challenge that has to be met with strategy and astuteness, instinct and resourcefulness, canniness, and calculation. Otherwise, you could end up back at square one, with the added burden of loss of time, money, and effort.
Get your experience and inherent business wisdom together, and let’s begin the search.
What Makes Web Designer Great?
As a small business owner, obviously, you appreciate the need for a website that does its job. Website designers transform your vision/goal into a website. This includes the graphics/images. They may or may not be strong on coding basics.
On your agenda, the first thing is to figure out the boundaries between what makes a designer competent, good or great. Which begs the question, why settle for competent or good when you can have great?
Since business owners may not be experts in web design, they evaluate a design according to its effectiveness, performance, ease of use, the buzz it creates on social media, and ultimately, how much revenue it helps to drive towards your business. However, it’s wise to educate yourself about some of the basics so that you know what is being discussed at meetings and consultations.
1. Originality, Quality of Content: Statistics show that nearly 38% of visitors to websites abandon it if the content is not engaging or the layout is boring/unattractive. If your website looks similar to the thousands of sites out there, it would not stand out from the crowd or be memorable and distinctive. Great designers incorporate original, top-quality content.
2. Planning and Organization: Granted, web designers are creative people. But unless they’re capable of precision planning and organization, you could end up wasting time, money, and effort, going back and forth with discussions, meetings, design disputes, and hundreds of cups of coffee, with nothing much to show at the end of it all. Firm deadlines and regular communication are key to great web design process.
3. Effectiveness: When you look at the design mockups, check whether the site provides information that’s easy to access and view immediately. Does the site incorporate intuitive navigation and prominently displayed action items? Is the flow logical enough for the user to have a seamless and smooth journey through the site? Most importantly, is the loading speed high enough across different devices?
4. Tools: Does the designer use the right tools to evaluate the site’s performance before the final cut is made? Google Analytics is a great free resource, but others, such as Clicky, Click Tale, Click Density, etc. can evaluate different aspects of the site and test drive the site before launch.
How to Hire the Best Designer within a Very Short Time
Hiring a top-quality web designer isn’t all that different from hiring someone to work in your company. You can flag many of the same criteria you’d use to evaluate a candidate for a job: Skills, qualifications, experience, portfolio of work, soft skills, former places worked/clients, dedication and commitment.
1. Analyze your requirements: What are you attempting to achieve with the website? This means taking a long, hard, and objective look at what exactly you want and you don’t want. List out the websites you admire and the ones you hate. Select different ones for different aspects such as look and feel, aesthetics, ease of navigation, workflow, function, etc. Get a firm idea of the image you wish to project. Is it in sync with your company’s overall image: young, trendy, contemporary, or traditional, well-established, seasoned, elegant? Make a list of must-haves. Set a time-frame.
2. Know what’s expected from your side: Will you get regular updates from the developers?
Are you supposed to make frequent edits yourself? Who supplies the content? Firm up these aspects before you talk to the designer.
3. Get Recommendations: Referrals from experts in the field, trusted sources, your staff, business associates with great websites are the best way to identify the best designer. If you’re planning a website redesign, it’s wise to contact the original designer to have an easier, smoother experience. However, if you haven’t been happy with the original design, look for a different one. References are a good way to get feedback on designers. If clients have found them expensive, inefficient, poor on deadlines and delivery, stay clear of them.
4. Skills and Rate: Once you’ve firmed up on what kind of website design you need, it’s a question of finding the right match of skill-sets. Some types of design may require particular skills such as JavaScript, etc., and essential image editor skills such as (Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator), CSS/CSS3, PHP, etc. However, all designers should have certain fundamental non-technical skills, as well. They should be able to communicate their ideas clearly and logically through the medium of reports, mockups, wireframes, etc. They should also be open to suggestions, be capable of research and analysis, and know-how/when decision-making points have been reached.
Another concern that business owners may have is the rate charged by web designers. The price range in the market is as diverse as the number and type of designers available, going all the way from $10-100 an hour. In this scenario, it’s difficult to firm up on pricing. Evaluate industry-averages for the type of website you want and sync it with your budget, the size and complexity of your project, and if you’re using freelancers, where they’re located, and the portal you use to reach them. Remember that added functions such as coding and front-end development could hike the rates.
5. If You Have The Time: Though your need is immediate, check if you have a small window of time where you can test the designer’s competence and suitability with a smaller project. If you can assign a short, non-critical project, this would be the ideal evaluation. Interviews, portfolios, and documents may not always give you the whole picture. Observing your designer in action is a sure-fire test of their overall capabilities.
