How to Choose Web Design Company?

Web Design Company
There are many people on internet who call themselves as web designers and web design companies. Many people do it for fun, as a hobby or part-time. Web design companies full-time operations are way to go.. Web design companies doing it for living will take your project seriously. Make sure your web design company has done enough research on internet technologies.
5 firm steps for finding the right Web design company for you

1. Assess your needs:
A professional Web design company will work with you rather than for you. It will help you in defining your organization's requirements. Still, you should have a basic idea of what your web site can do for you. Will it serve as an informative catalog? Will it grab new clients? Will it strengthen relationship with your existing clients? Will it serve the needs of your workers?
There are few initial requirements your organization should aware of:
The intended audience for the Web site
The intended goal of the project
Anticipated budget for the Web site
How the project will fit into a larger marketing/corporate scheme
The individuals/departments within your organization responsible for the project
These initial requirements will help you finding web design firm best suited for your project. You should document them and use them as a basis for evaluating each web design firm. This document will serve as your benchmark to measure each web design firm.

2. List Generation:
You can use many ways to search web design firm. There are strengths and weaknesses on selecting a method to search for web design firm. Combination of different approaches will be your best bet in hunt of web design firm for your project.

Competitors' web sites:
Look for web sites of organizations that you like, mainly web sites of your competitors. Sometimes you have to look for web sites other than your industry. Mostly, web design firm includes site credits (example: developed by 4MDESIGNERS). You can simply visit web design firm's web site and carry on your analysis. If you cannot find the credits on the site, feel free to contact the organization and ask which Web design firm is responsible for the web site? You can at least have some comments about that web design firm from the organization you will be contacting.

Ask your Social Circle and Family:
Ask your friends, colleagues and family which web design firm designed their web site, or if they otherwise recommend a web design firm. Find out what they liked or disliked about web design firm and about web site they developed for them. Few companies' produces better results when they are given Start-Finish task while few are more inclined towards doing particular task.
3. Short List

By considering above mentioned you organization should create a short list of 4-5 web design firms that are best suited for your project.
Evaluate their work:

When its said evaluate, it means you have to evaluate their portfolio, kind of web sites they have developed. If you want to sell products online, you should look for proven ecommerce solutions web design firm has developed.

It's essential that you research a web design firm's work so you can evaluate their potential and quality standards. A web site does not have to be flashy or very interactive to hit the deck, but you must appreciate web design firm's design sense. Also, consider hiring a firm familiar with your particular industry.
When evaluating web design firms, note geographical location of their clients. A Web design firm that has worked with clients in many geographical locations will have a more global approach to your Web site.

Avoid Freelancers:
Don't select a freelancer for your project on a freelance basis, to design and develop your organization's web site. It is rare to find a single person capable of handling all development, visual, technical and web marketing elements that make an effective web presence. More over, by depending on an individual, your organization is at risk of losing its time and money should anything occur to that one individual?
Determine what other products/services the Web design company can offer
What kind of value-added products or services can the design firm offer? Internet Marketing and Web site promotion? Newsletter or email campaigns? If your organization is not currently dealing with a print design agency, for example, this might be a factor for dealing with one group over another. Similarly, can the firm provide database and software development should your organization wish to Web-enable some of its existing systems or processes?
During this stage, your organization should make contact with the potential Web design firms that are on your shortlist.

4. Get Quote/Proposals
Good web design firm will always be ready to submit a proposal for your website along with defined timeline, deliverables and terms & conditions. When evaluating proposal, look how they communicate with you using their website and digital documents.
Maintain a list for each proposal, consisting of its strengths and weaknesses, and the strengths and weaknesses of the respective Web design firm based on its other materials (Web site, portfolio, brochure, case studies, etc.).

5. Evaluate Proposals
After your organization has received all proposals, review and compare them with each other. How do they fare in terms of presentation? Do they present upgrade paths for your project, going beyond the needs of the immediate goals outlined?

6. Think ahead.
Over the past year, many of web design companies of different sizes have emerged, closed their operations or cut back. It's important to ask web design company about long-term relationship.

Abdul Muizz is a Project Manager at http://www.4mdesigners.com Can contact him at amz@4mdesigners.com

How To Pick Your SEO Web Design Company

In SEO you will run across two types of sites. There are those which may have been designed in a way that is no longer being used and others where the design is an ongoing project. Both can be good and bad points but only one will have an advantage when you are dealing with the client.

There are many pros and cons that come with SEO. When the designer is finished completing it you may still find a great deal of structural and design issue that should be revisited. Unless your designer has a great deal of skill when it comes to SE friendly designs, you will be working on a lot of structural issues. The positive side of this issue is that we get to work on the site and the designer wont feel bad when you explain something that needs to be changed.

In another story, when you work with the designer, you will find that the designer will get personally offended when you want to make changes to his structure of your site or he may challenge you about your views on SEO friendly websites. Take for instance the argument that an All Flash Site is more appealing.

The SEO may argue that Flash will not be read properly and will have less spidered content that the search engines will see. The Designer will say that flash is read on Google easily. The SEO will tell them that it doesnt in the same way; you have to maintain that one needs many pages of optimized content and the Flash will not do that. The designer will disagree. However the point remains that the Site needs to be converted.

It is important that the designer understands why it is important to know that conversions are essential, however so is the traffic. The designer will also need to know that if there is no traffic then even 100% conversion will be irrelevant.

However you will sometimes deal with a SEO who knows how important this to the success of the site is. Making the two balance out is a scary task, but when the SEO and the web designer mesh we are talking about an ultimate website. If you have an idea, and it is not working out to be a good solution the web designer may have an idea that will make your site more attractive as well as knowing the problem and helping you with the solution.

Picking a good web designer

The two main things you should consider is that they can build a site that is both attractive and SEO friendly.

Attractive Designs

When you choose a designer you should take a look at their portfolio to see what designs they have made in the past, and get the advice of the people who are in your target audience. It may also be a good idea to see what the leaders in your industry are doing and who designed their sites. Remember just because you like the design, does not mean that it will be good for your target market.

You will also need to know if the designer is good at the conversion optimization skill. You will want to know if they are clear about the best colors to get people to check out your site. They should have done some eye tracking studies which will see how the visitors reacted after visiting the site. You need not be concerned if they dont know all of these things, the information is available so you will know what to look for before you approve the design.

Building an SEO friendly website

This is one of the most important areas that you must address; you will need to have a search engine friendly design if you are going to get the rank you need to be successful. The skilled web designer is going to have a strong knowledge of CSS and will know to put the main formatting into the file. Much too often people are getting a lot of sites with font tags, size tags, and color tags. This process will give the search engines a lot to dig through to find the content that they are looking for. If you have a table based design it needs to be technically sound.

Another thing to be aware of is bad internal links. You will need links on your internal pages to move up on the rank. Most sites try to target certain phrases on the homepage but internal pages will hold specific products and services. To maximize your rank on your internal pages you will need to be found by the spiders and to be associated with the keywords you will need to target.

If your designer uses image and scrip navigation that is okay, because it makes your website more appealing and makes sure that your key pages are being linked to content on the homepage and they can be spidered quickly.

You will sometimes even find some sites that are over optimized. There are designers who will pack in so many keywords that it will be hard to read and it doesnt work for the reader of the site. Your pages need to read like you are writing to your visitor not like you are writing for the search engine. You want your keywords to be in there but you only want a density of about 3% so that it can be read by humans.

About the Author

Moe Tamani is a Dallas Web Designer specializing in SEO Web Design.

Article Source: Content for Reprint