If you are an entrepreneur convinced that the presence of your business on the Internet will give you a competitive advantage over other businesses in your sector, you should know that having a website goes beyond owning a domain (www.your-name.com) and that requires an additional process to the mere staging of your online catalog.
Although a web designer is really the one who designs or models a web page, we will refer to this as the person or company that is in charge of carrying out that process so important to your business and that basically involves three main aspects: the construction of the site, the promotion and updating.
Here are 10 tips to help you make your best choice when hiring a web designer:
1. The web designer must have his own page on the Internet. Whether this designer is a freelance or a company, don't trust this work to someone who hasn't taken the trouble to create their own cover letter.
2. Browse their website… do you find it pleasant? Does it inspire confidence? If the answer is yes, then visit some of the sites you have designed and answer the same questions; If the answer is still affirmative, write to those sites and ask for references of who you are thinking of hiring.
3. Do not get carried away only by the price, sometimes the cheap is expensive. Some questions you should ask yourself about the price of the service is if it includes:
to. Hosting
b. Domain.
c. An adequate amount of content (pages, text, images, flash, logo…).
d. Personalized email.
and. Contact Form.
F. Dynamic applications.
4. Regarding hosting, ask if it will support the visitor traffic that you have budgeted for your website and ask for a guarantee. Some companies share their server and assign a very small space to each business they hire. If your number of visitors skyrockets, your site may crash if it has reached the monthly limit (measured in kilobytes transferred from the server where your page is hosted to the visitor's PC).
5. Will your data and those of your visitors or clients be protected? Taking into account the limitations of the network, verify that your website is hosted on a server that provides directory protection and that offers the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol.
6. Verify who will be the owner of the domain and the content of the website once the project is finished. Be careful: do not be surprised to discover that the website is not yours.
7. Verify that the web designer has a clear methodology for carrying out the project:
to. Presentation of the budget.
b. Offering a pre-design for approval.
c. Deadlines.
d. Delivery of the material.
and. Joint work.
F. Mode and means of payment.
8. A professional designer offers a guarantee of his work. Ask what that guarantee consists of.
9. How far will the promotional work go? Typically, a web design company will present you with separate quotes for design and promotion; However, if your budget is low, a good option is to choose who offers within the same budget a minimum of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or optimization of your website for search engines, which should include:
to. Title of the different pages that make up your website.
b. Description of the site.
c. Definition and exposition of the keywords.
d. Registration in different directories and search engines.
10. Update and maintenance. Ask for clarity on this point. Some companies offer free upgrade and maintenance for the first few months of service.
Now let's get to work. We hope these 10 tips become strong negotiating tools for your Internet business.
