Some common questions about choosing a web design company:

Q. How much will it cost to design my website?

A. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for. If you have had several quotes for designing your website, ask yourself why some are cheaper than others. Is it because they work in a back bedroom somewhere or have they contracted out the design to an offshore company? At the other end of the scale, does the most expensive necessarily mean the best quality or will you be paying for the high overheads of a city centre office.

As a rule of thumb, Hadlow Systems charge from £600 for a brochure website and from £1,000 for a (Content Management System)CMS-based website, although these prices can vary significantly depending on your exact requirements.

Q. Do I need to meet my website designer?

A. It is very important that you trust your designer and you are able to work with them to get the results you want to achieve. If the designer is unwilling to meet you at least once, you should ask why. Phone the designer and have a good discussion to see if you get on – initial impressions are usually the most reliable! Trust is very important. Check the designer’s website for clear contact information such as a physical address and telephone number, especially if you are being asked to hand over a substantial deposit.

Q. How do I know if they are any good?

A. Firstly, take a look at their portfolio page. While looking at each site in their portfolio, make sure the quality is consistently high and each site contains a link saying they were designed by the designer themselves. Also check all the way through the portfolio for consistency as it may be padded out with sites which may not meet your design criteria. People surfing the web use a number of different web browsers, e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera. Download these browsers (free) to your computer and look at the designer’s sites in each one to ensure that they are consistent. Navigate round the designer’s own site and check it for dead links, misspelled words and any other errors. Faults in your designer’s site will probably be repeated on yours.

Secondly, check out their testimonials and references. If there are no testimonials available, ask yourself why. If they are available, make sure they have a link to a site designed by your designer, not just some words plucked out of thin air. They should be from a named individual who you can contact to verify what the testimonial says. Call or email the references and ask how satisfied they were with the work, not just the website itself but the service they were given.

Finally, designers should be aware of, and produce work to, accepted standards of website code. There are many ways to develop a web page and the results often look exactly the same. But, behind the scenes, some designers use techniques which are not consistent with the standards and as a result, your website may contain hidden time bombs which may go off unexpectedly in the future as browsers change the way your pages are displayed. A designer’s site should display the fact that their coding meets the accepted standards. If it doesn’t, yours is unlikely to either. Also check that your designer is able to comply with the minimum accessibility requirements so that your site can be viewed by visitors with impaired sight, for example.

Q. Where can I get the right images for my website?

A. If you don't want to use photos which you have taken yourself, there are a number of image libraries which stock photographs for every conceivable application. Normally, you buy credits which will give you unlimited usage of a certain number of images on your website and in your marketing material. Don't be tempted to use stock library images you haven't paid for, or any other images for which you don't own the copyright. Litigation can be very damaging!

If you are going to use your own photographs or images from stock libraries, invest in image manipulation software, e.g. Corel Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. This will enable you to present your images in the optimum size and clarity to be viewed on the web.

Q. I've got my website but nobody visits it. How can I attract visitors?

A. Some website designers put too much effort into producing a site stuffed with flashy effects and innovative use of graphics and sound just to prove how clever they are. You could spend several thousand pounds on a site which looks fantastic but which nobody sees. The content of a site is one of the most important factors for ensuring that the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) give your site a high ranking.

Your designer needs to do some research on the keywords and phrases which you would expect potential visitors to your site to enter into Google/Yahoo and build your page headings and descriptions around them. Be careful of 'specialist' SEO (search engine optimisation) companies who promise you top rankings at a high price. A good website design company should be able to offer advice and build in a minimum level of SEO-friendly features as part of the design process.

Q. How do I maintain my website's content?

A. You could have the best site money could buy but if it is out of date within days of being built, it will turn visitors away. You must ensure that someone, yourself or your designer, is responsible for and capable of maintaining the content so it is as current as possible. If you have an eCommerce website, you will need to be able to update product information but make sure that the mechanism for this is efficient, i.e. by having an import facility into your shopping cart software.

Hadlow Systems specialise not only in website design, but also in keeping your content up to date. Speak to any of our customers about our content maintenance service.