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The best way to learn anything is by making moves and making mistakes, but choosing the wrong website design company can cost you money, time, and loss of opportunity. And with so many options to choose from – local web design agency, large website design agency, overseas developers or agencies, freelance developers – it is easier now than ever to make mistakes. Especially if you’re not somewhat familiar with digital marketing, which a lot of business owners are not.
Regardless of your familiarity and knowledge of digital marketing and website design, keep reading to find out the main 5 things to help you choose the best website design company for your business.
How to choose a website design company
1. Portfolio of work
The most important thing to look at when choosing a website design agency is is to figure out if they are legit and the first thing to look at is their portfolio of web design work. You’re looking for real websites that they created for real businesses. If they don’t have a portfolio, keep looking. If they have fake mockup websites to show, but no real websites, keep looking. If they do great work that they are proud of, it only makes sense to show it off and use it as marketing material. Visit at least 5-10 websites from their portfolio, not just to ensure that they are real, but also to see if the websites their website developers create work well and look good, and ultimately to see if you like their work.
2. Client reviews
Next up, take a look at their reviews. If they don’t have any reviews, keep looking, as you’d be taking a chance on someone just starting out. Most established website design companies and marketing companies have reviews. If they have bad reviews, then obviously stay away. If they have good reviews, do some due diligence to make sure that they are real reviews. A web design company would have reviews from business owners, or marketing team of a business, so you’d be able to search up a couple of the names and their company names to make sure.
Also, Google reviews are meant to be more reliable because it’s not the companies’ own website where they can manipulate and make up reviews, delete bad reviews; but you still can get fake google accounts to leave reviews, which google doesn’t always catch so it’s best to do some due diligence on your own.
3. History
This one is pretty straight forward. How long have they been in business? This is a good tip when searching for any type of company to hire, not just a website design company. The longer they’ve been in business, the more likely they are a legitimate company that does decent work at the very least, or else they wouldn’t still be in business. There’s many ways you can check this, but one of the easiest is by searching up their website URL in the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive . This will only show you how far back their website goes, so if they had a rebrand or a merger, their website may be more recent than they’ve actually been in business.
4. Match
The website design process is collaborative, so there must be a match between your company and the website design company.
Match in requirements and capabilities. You have a set of goal and requirements that you have for your website – write these down. Do you need online booking, contact forms, landing pages for each service you offer, etc., try to be as detailed as possible to ensure that the website design agency has the capability to deliver what you need to create a positive impact for your business.
Match in price and budget. Match in communication style, and work processes. A bad match, whether it’s at the communication level, at the capabilities level, or at any other level, can throw your website design project off course and become a bad, unprofitable experience.
5. Ask questions
The most important way to find out if the website design company you’re dealing with is legit, professional, reliable, and skilled – is by asking the right questions during the initial consultation. Ask about their history, company size, culture, what does the web design process look like, cost, timeline, will you be working with project manager or directly with designer, do they outsource or do all website design work in house, do they handle ongoing maintenance, how much does that cost, etc. Prepare your list of requirements and questions before the consultation to make sure everything is addressed prior to hiring the website design agency.
