Your Website Designer is an Investment – Choose Wisely and Trust Implicitly

Finding a designer can be a tricky, and even a stressful process. Let’s face it there are an awful lot to choose from and making the wrong choice can have disastrous consequences, so how do you know which designer you should choose, and once you have made your choice, how much should you trust them with your creative visions?

Read the Signs

Designers are everywhere. Yellow pages, directories and freelance sites just for starters, but any website designer worth their salt is going to have a dedicated website with a comprehensive portfolio for you to browse through.  Your first indication of how good your new potential website designer might be is the quality of their website. It’s as important as their portfolio in showing you their capabilities and strengths and it should be very well-designed. If it isn’t then move swiftly on.

A Portfolio Speaks a Thousand Words

When you’re looking through a portfolio try and focus on quality and style. A good designer is flexible in which case their portfolio will contain a variety of styles. It’s less important that they have worked in your market segment before ie. I only want a designer that has designed websites for companies who make jewel encrusted cat collars before, it’s not reasonable or relevant. What you should be asking is has this designer designed web sites that are of the type I’m looking for… ie. E-Commerce Store, Wordpress Blog etc. and if so do I like the designs of the sites in question. This means they have the technical know-how to carry your project through to completion which might seem to be a no-brainer but web design is a vast area with many different development platforms and website types, if they haven’t designed say a Wordpress site before then they may very well not have that particular skill set. Their portfolio should appeal to you and you should see plenty of examples in it that strike you as impressive.

What Do Other People Say

Designers recognize they are an important investment for you and so will more often then not supply testimonials from previous and current clients on their website. These are a valuable way for you to verify the credibility of your designer, and if you’re still not convinced most designers will be happy to supply you with references.

Talk it Out and Trust Your Instincts

So you have taken all the above steps and you have decided to write to your potential new designer with a request for a quote.  Their reply is going to give you the final answers you need both from what they say to you, and by reading between the lines. Assuming your happy with the quote, are you also happy with the time-frame, do they come across as someone who is going to be approachable and flexible to your needs? Or are they a little frosty and someone you might find it hard to be honest with? Do they sound professional? Did they answer your email promptly? A website is a large investment so a good designer will recognize this and ask you questions. It’s very important for you to respect the questions, it means they are taking you seriously and want to provide you with the most appropriate information. By not answering questions or giving sketchy answers you are only hurting yourself and your chances of getting what it is that you want. Armed with your answers a good designer will furnish you with a proposal, breaking down the process involved, what you can expect from their service, what their service includes, how many revisions you are entitled to etc.

Trust Implicitly?

Assuming you have taken the steps above and are happy with your choice of designer then you have given yourself no reason not to trust them implicitly. A designer has a difficult job in the sense that you don’t really understand what it is they’re doing, you don’t understand how a bunch of code can make a website work and what that code might be, you don’t understand what goes into figuring out a website layout and navigation, you don’t know the constraints of the technology and so on so forth which makes hiring a designer very different from hiring someone to paint your house! By now your designer has a very good sense of who you are and what you want. You have showed them examples of other websites you like, what it is you like about them, you have told them what the most important elements of your website are going to be and where you want attention drawn the most and you have told them who your competitors are and what you like/dislike about what they’re doing. You have talked about branding, color schemes and design styles. …oh you haven’t? Then return to the last paragraph and read the sentence about answering your designers questions.

So now what?

Now you take a step back and let your designer do what they do best.  Most designers will perform their best and create their very best work if given room to do so, they will give you ample opportunity to comment and give feedback so the design can be tweaked and perfected as you go but try and take over, and guide too much and your designer will stop making the creative decisions on your behalf which is something of a travesty soon as that’s what you hired them for. Would you tell your accountant how to prepare your tax return? Would you tell your dentist how you want your teeth drilled? If you have followed the above steps before hiring your designer then you have already covered all your bases and protected your investment…now you can just sit back and enjoy the very exciting process of seeing your website come to life!