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Helping you make the most of your small business Web site.
« Experience (choosing a Web designer) | Why you should pay more than £99 for a Web site »Although accessibility, usability and content are more important than appearance, design style is the first thing to look at. There are a huge number of skilled Web designers that can create accessible and usable Web sites who have a wide variety of design styles.
The first thing to do is look at the designer’s Web site and their portfolio. This will give you an idea about the style of Web sites they design and you can see if they create the kind of site you want.
No matter how good they might be otherwise, if you don’t like their style then it’s not going to be a happy relationship. Either they will create something they don’t like and you won’t get the best from them, or they will create something you don’t like.
As well as the look of previous sites it’s worth investigating the kind of Web sites the designer has previously designed.
Some designers tend to get a look of work for similar businesses like for example photographers. If you are a photographer then this means the designer should have more of an understanding of Web sites for photographers than a designer who mainly works for accountants.
To find out how good the designer is at search engine optimisation, pick a client and try searching for them in your favourite search engine. Don’t choose a search that’s too general though as it can take a lot of time and money to get high rankings for general terms.
For example if one of the designers sites is a bakery, don’t just search for bakery. Try searching for bakery and the area where the bakery is, e.g. bakery nottingham. If the site doesn’t appear in the first page of results, then people probably won’t find it from a search engine.
Good professional Web designers build Web sites to follow a set of standards. You can easily test to see if a Web designer’s site and sites ion their portfolios follow these standards.
There are two tools for checking Web sites:
Both these tools just need you to type in the Web address and press a button, they then tell you if the pages have any errors. You don’t need to worry about all the other technical details in the results page.
Making sure that pages follow these standards means that they will work better on a wide range of computers.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Small business Web sites.
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Some well written sites may not pass the CSS validation as they use browser specific styles (e.g. styles that only work in Firefox or Safari).
While these pages are not actually valid, this is not necessarily a problem. So if you see a few CSS errors in a page, there is no need to rule the designer out. On the other hand 72 errors is a good sign to stay clear.