An effective business website brings a steady stream of sales, leads and inquiries to your business. An effective website is designed around your company objectives and will hinge on your choice of a web designer. A good designer is part business consultant, part graphics designer and part web traffic expert. Here are things to look at when you hire a web designer.

1. Do they understand your goals? Your website needs to meet your business objectives. It should reflect the correct business image when compared to your competitors. If generating leads is your number one goal, do they understand the correct way to design a lead generation website?
2. Do they understand how to design for web traffic? If organic search rankings are important, then choose a designer experienced in SEO. They should be able to demonstrate SEO results. Search engine optimization should be designed in with keywords built into navigation, page names, links and body text.
3. Can they integrate web applications?: Most websites today includes web applications. By adding online tools, searchable databases of your work, pricing wizards and complex sign-up applications you can automate your business website. These can be programmed from scratch or a pre-built one added.
4. Who will maintain the website? Once the website is complete, who will maintain the website? Website maintenance includes changing content, photos, adding pages, adding applications or adding a blog. If something “breaks”, who will fix it?
5. Who will host the website? It is nice to have one source for your web needs. Make sure you are getting high quality business website hosting that is maintained within a data center. One that has multiple Internet trunks and power backups. Stay away from designers who host on a computer in their office or apartment.

Other things to look for:  what is their lead time? Will they supply a written fixed price proposal? How long have they been in business? Will they still be in business when you need help? Are they easy to reach and communicate with?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 4:40 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.