4 Handy Tips When Hiring A Web Designer For Your Business Website

As an employer, you would certainly want to have the perfect website for your business. You want your website to represent your brand and your products perfectly.

Your website is a marketing tool that can help you generate more traffic into your physical store (but what if you don’t have a physical store? Well, that example just fell flat on its face, didn’t it?), and you have the perfect vision of how your website is going to look like. That’s cool and all, BUT…

Ok, let’s address the elephant in the room. Hiring a web designer is a daunting task if you don’t know what you are doing. Actually, dealing with anyone in the tech industry (especially if you aren’t a tech nerd yourself) is always tricky.

If you are a simple pet store owner in Sydney looking to build a website for your brand, managing a relationship with a web designer is indeed weird to you. They come up with all their tech mumbo jumbo while bragging about how much they know about coding too, which will confuse you into paying them more money.

Now, you don’t want that to happen, do you? Well, I am going to help you. Here are 4 tips to consider when hiring a web designer for your business website.

STEP 1: Make Some Decisions Before You Start

It shouldn’t come as a shock that you should look through their resume or portfolio when you opt to hire anyone. But in the case of hiring a web designer, a few points need to be mentioned. First off, ask yourself a bunch of questions:

1. What is your business, and what type of web design is appropriate for your business?
2. What is your target audience, and how will you implement the UX (user experience)? 
3. Will you be able to categorise your content through software applications like CMS?
4. What is your branding strategy?

You have to answer these questions before hiring a web designer, not after. For example, let’s say you want to open up an e-commerce store or a website for a Sydney restaurant. So, you would know that your web designer must have the whole “consumer-friendly” philosophy in mind when designing the website.

The designer must also know how to give your website some sort of personality for you to sell products better. With that in mind, we should know exactly what we are trying to accomplish with our website, and we need to know if the designer can help us reach that goal.

Therefore, asking some internal questions and then analyzing the designer’s portfolio to find projects with ideal characteristics is the first step in our journey of finding a befitting web designer. 

STEP 2: A Company Or a Freelancer?

While some people may have certain biases like “Oh, a web design company, for sure. It’s just more reliable” or “Definitely a freelancer, they offer more customization in their design.”, choosing between a freelancer and a company is entirely dependant on your individual circumstances.

At the end of the day, there is no correct answer. You just have to know what works best for you when looking for quality web design services in Australia.

For instance, if you hire a freelancer (let’s say a good one), you could probably communicate with the designer better than you could communicate with a whole company with more than one speaker.

When the designer offers full customer support, you will sufficiently explain your needs and define work ethics. Moreover, your wallet will thank you, too.

On the other hand, if you hire a web design company, the chances are that an entire group of dedicated designers and developers (or even content creators) will work on your website with constant supervision.

With their brainstorming and consistent feedback, they guarantee their customer’s satisfaction. But, you might not be able to afford a good company, especially if you have just started a business.

STEP 3: You Need to Generate Traffic, Right?

What’s the point of a website if it doesn’t achieve your business goals? Since almost all of those goals revolve around you getting more visitors to your website, the person you hire must promise a product that does so. This is when SEO (do I even need to say what it stands for?) comes to play. 

SEO is an essential factor in generating organic traffic. It starts simply with creating user-friendly content and optimizing it for search engines with software applications like CMS and goes all the way to implementing niche-related keywords, meta tag descriptions, and whatnot.

Now you might ask, “How does web design help SEO?”. Well, if the web designer implements responsive design, mobile optimization, fast load times, descriptive URLs, optimized pictures, and other tactics, your website will generate organic traffic.

While web design companies almost always have SEO in their packages, some freelancers don’t. So be careful whom you hire. 

STEP 4: Maintenance and Updates

Not all of us are tech geeks. We think that the process of designing and creating a website is a one-and-done thing, but in reality, a website needs to be constantly updated.

Problems are sure to arise in the future, and we must be able to deal with them, so if a business owner knows how to update and maintain their website, all the power to them. But if they can’t, the only choice is to rely on the company/freelancer they hired.

Many things need to be considered when maintaining a website: SEO and the constant Google core updates. If you feel like your content isn’t doing your web page any good, you must update or remove it entirely.

Or maybe you think specific parts of the design are outdated or some backlinks are broken or useless; who knows? You have to be ready to change every aspect of your website at all times. Therefore, if the designer you hire knows how to do it, paying him a few extra bucks wouldn’t hurt.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the business owner decides what’s best for their business. Hiring a web designer could be challenging if you don’t know what to do or where to start looking, but hopefully, this blog will be a starting point for your future research.