Website Marketing - Evaluating a Designer What to Look For

December 12, 2008 by Curt Siters

I just finished a website, Quilt BowTik, for a client and thought, ok, this would be a good example for my Internet Marketing Series to highlight a few points of the series. Mostly I am going to discuss finding an independent website designer or website design company.

When looking at potential people or firms to design and create your website, you should check their references. Before you talk to the site owners go to their website and jot down notes about things that strike you hardest. Visit a few of the pages and get a feel for the site.

• Is the navigation easy to understand and use? Is it consistent across the site?
• How is the text laid out? Is it text heavy or text light?
• How are graphics used? Are there too many or too few?
• What about audio and video?
• How about flash?
• What about the use of colors? Are they bold and in your face or so little color it seems sterile?

Then when you feel you’ve explored the site enough take a moment and ask yourself what the intent of the design is. I don’t mean why is it there - although sometimes that may be hard to figure out.

• When you contact the reference ask things like:
• how did they find the designer?
• Was the designer easy to work with?
• Did the designer work within time and monetary budgets?
• What is the intent of the design of site?

The intent of the design of QuiltBowTik.com is something simple, not overwhelming and easy to navigate, which is why it harkens back to the early days of the world wide web in appearance and navigation.

The purpose of the site is to provide her with an online brochure of the quilts she has done for those interested in getting a custom made quilt.

The owner also wanted to spend as little as possible and not have to invest time in learning to code web pages to make updates or pay someone to do the updates (although I think should would have been ok with that as it doesn’t need to be updated more than a couple of times per month.)

I had considered setting her up with Wordpress but the time involved in customizing the appearance would have been equal to creating a custom super simple CMS system. However, the learning curve for the custom content management system would be shorter which is a plus in her favor.

Taking these things into account even though it isn’t a big flashy (or flash based) website, it fits her needs and desires and the intent quite well. So, when evaluating a person or firms ability to do websites don’t just look at a sample and say that isn’t flashy so this person/firm isn’t any good.

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Curt Siters is an Independent Associate for Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. He is also aYoung Living Essential Oils Independent distributor and publishes articles on YourWebReference and at TheVeryEssence. He also does web work such as website design, website maintenance and SEO for websites.

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