Now that you have decided that it is time to create a website for your business there are many questions you must answer. One of the most important questions is “Who should create my website?”

I like to use the analogy of playing music; in as little as a few hours, some people can strum a few chords on the guitar and play a song. But to really play the instrument and make your instrument sing requires experience and understanding. Likewise, although there are tools which are readily available to assist in the process, effective website design requires experience and understanding of many diverse areas including: marketing, Internet graphics options and limitations, effectively creating a site from the perspective of search engines, the differences and limitations of different browsers and computer platforms as well as knowledge of the software and coding required to move beyond simple static html pages.

It is also vitally important that your designer understand you and your business and know how to most effectively communicate you and your uniqueness to your Internet audience. To answer our question, we’ll look at some important pieces of information that you’ll need to find out before you choose your website designer.

What do you want in a website? What are your needs and intentions for having a website? Does the prospective designer listen to and understand your needs and intentions? Have you checked other similar businesses to see what they are doing on the Internet? Can a prospective designer offer any suggestions for improving upon what others have already accomplished? The more clarity you have about your intended results for having a website, the more accurately you can communicate your needs to your designer and the more likely it is that you will achieve these results.

Is the designer experienced in website design? How long has the designer been creating websites? What is their background? How long have they been using the Internet? Three years is a long time in Internet terms. More than four or five years is a seasoned veteran. Ideally, your site designer has a variety of experience.

What are the designer’s strengths and weaknesses? The range of skills required for creating any type of website is more diverse than you can imagine. If a designer tells you they have done or can do any project, I’d suggest you take that statement with a grain of salt.

Is the designer easy to work with and talk to? Is she/he able to communicate technical information so that you can understand it? The process of creating a website can often be an overwhelming process for some people. Consider hiring a designer with whom you have a good rapport and find communicating with easy.

Look at some of their previous clients sites. Do they all look the same? Do they load quickly? Are they easy to navigate through? Do you like their previous work? Do they accurately reflect their clients’ business? Does the designer custom create each site or would they have you select from a list of prepackaged sites?

What is your budget and what is the typical cost for the designer’s projects? As a generalization, the larger the company, the more they charge for their services (and often the more elaborate the sites they create.) Companies which create sites from a prepackaged template often cost less but don’t provide you with custom solutions which may more closely meet your needs. Site designers who are getting started will often create your site for a lower fee, essentially using your project to develop their skills.

Your decision should be based on many of these important questions. Also use any other questions you find useful when hiring any other service business for a project. Comparing website designers is sometimes like comparing bananas to bicycles instead of apples to apples. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You might consider writing pros and cons for each designer on a sheet of paper to develop a more objective point of view.

The selection of your website designer is an important step in the creation of a successful website. With time and patience, you too can join the thousands of businesses with successful websites.

The majority of website designers focus wrongly on designing websites that appeal to their clients. This leads to websites that are poorly designed to serve the needs of the visitor or the client. After years involved in website design and evaluating and optimizing websites, I recently concluded that the vast majority of today’s websites are no better designed now than they were 5 years ago.

Yes, websites designed in the past 5 years certainly look a lot better and have more wow features like impressive effects, stunning graphics and clever videos. But that doesn’t mean as websites they perform any better in satisfying the needs of the visitor or the website owner. In fact very often all these effects, graphics and flash videos while enhancing the visual appeal of the website actually make the website worse in terms of performance. By performance I mean how well the website satisfies the objectives it should have been designed to meet.

When you are looking to have a website designed or redesigned the first thing you need to establish is what are the objectives of the website?

What is the purpose of the website?

Is the purpose to:

Stun visitors with a jaw dropping graphics and effects?
Get good reviews for your website from other website designers?
Inform and educate visitors?
Attract the right visitors interested in what the website has to offer?
Sell products or services?
Capture leads or subscribers?
If you want evidence of the extent to which web designers focus on the visual appeal of a website rather that being fit for a purpose, you only have to look at the dozens of websites that showcase what they consider to be good website designs.

These showcase sites for good website design feature 1,000’s of websites submitted by web designers that get reviewed and voted for largely by their peers, or so it would seem. Examples are siteinspire.net, unmatchedstyle.com, csselite.com, beautiful2.com, webcreme.com, creattica.com, divinecss.com, foliofocus.com, cartfrenzy.com and bestwebgallery.com. Some, but not all of these showcase websites state what they regard as good website design in their submission guidelines.

Unmatchedstyle.com are dedicated to acknowledging those who have made exceptionally gorgeous web sites by employing web standards and good usability practices.

Foliofocus.com is a web design gallery that exists to showcase the best collection of portfolio sites from web and graphic designers, photographers, and other professionals.

Cartfrenzy.com is a design gallery for the most well-designed e-commerce and shopping websites.

Bestwebgallery.com features a wide range of quality design websites (Flash & CSS). They go on to declare what quality design means to them, which is:
Quality Design = Visual + Technical + Creativity
Note here the emphasis is on the visual appearance, technical wiz bangs and the creative merit.

Based on my own experience auditing and evaluating websites and those featured on showcase sites like the ones above, is why I have concluded that web designers focus too much on creating good looking websites that appeal to their peers.

Case Study

As if to prove the point I carried out a detailed case study of a highly rated website featured on unmatchedstyle.com. In choosing the website for this case study I was also looking for the site of a web design firm since that should represent all that’s best in good web design. The site received a 9.1 out of 10 rating for good design from the showcase site and a video review.

Following my detailed case study evaluation of the website I determined the web design quality rating of the home page to be 3.9 out of 10 and the website as a whole was rated 4.2 out of 10. Of course, I used different criteria for my ratings for good quality web design than did the showcase website that gave a rating of 9.1.

For the home page I used a checklist that evaluated 12 categories of design, with 135 elements of page design and for the whole website I used a checklist that evaluated 91 aspects of site design.

Any of the 226 aspects of web design that were not found to be present were also given a severity rating. This severity rating was based on the level of impact the missing aspect had on the design and on the frequency with which it occurred.

The number of aspects on which the web page or website passed combined with the level of severity was used in a formula to determine a rating of good quality web design.

What was clear from this case study is the site used in the study received a high 9.1 rating for good design from the showcase site based on a very different assessment criteria to my own, that gave the site a rating of only 4.2.

So, the question is, which rating for good website design is the right one, a showcase site rating of 9.1 or my rating of 4.2?

Well, that depends on whether you want to base a rating for good web design largely on looking good, or on a detailed assessment of 226 aspects of good web design I expect to find in a well designed website.

Deciding on what is a good website design also depends on whether you want a website that looks good or one that’s designed for a purpose and to satisfy some clearly defined objectives. If you want a website that does more than just look good then you need to look a bit more closely at the design of your website, because just looking good is never good enough, at least not for me.

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