Planning to hire the best Web design and development company? Well, you need to read this article first before taking any step.
Understand that the website acts as a window to provide an insight of your business to the customers. The website the web development company is going to design will play an important part in your company to achieve the desired marketing goals. Whether you are designing your website for the first time or revamping it, your hiring decision for the world’s best Web Design and Development Company will dictate your website success.
With multiple options of the web design companies and each claiming to be the best, makes the choice difficult as which one is the right fit for your business. The perfect and the best approach is to adopt a thorough hiring process. Just like hiring a new employee, interview your web design firm to, ask questions, review performance, request for portfolio and check references.
To help you, we brought here 20 interview questions to ask before hiring any web design company. This questionnaire session will help you and the company to get to know each other’s business well, your targeted audience and the objective for your websites. This will help the company to utilize their skills and develop the plan in a way to achieve your online business goals.
So here we go:
Commonly it assumes that a web design company offers web development, hosting, copywriting, e-commerce solutions, digital marketing services like SEO, social media or PPC management are related to each other whereas, in fact, these are different services from each other which require the different skillset.
Never assume that a company is good at one thing just because they are offering another. Almost every web design and development company are now offering digital marketing services too but don’t rely on them and let them handle all the digital work unless you get a solid, the desired result.
Web design and development companies offer both the options to satisfy their client needs. Some go for unique look and functionality built from scratch whiles others goes for the template to customize and save money. Discuss what you need for your website and compare the prices of both options before making any move.
Looking at the examples of the previously created websites by the web design company will help you evaluate the design diversity. Also check for the performance of their developed website while looking their portfolio, like site navigation, is the website well-crafted, are the designs modern, see if the design matches with the business.
Your website is not about only the online presence of your business but it should also get a return on investment and have the website deliver business results.
For that, ask for case studies. The case studies will provide you specific results like increased online sales, increased the lead and boosted conversion rate in certain time period.
The Web Design and Development Company you choose to design your website should be concerned about generating revenue for your website too. They should provide a genuine list of strategies that can be incorporate into a site design.
These result-oriented strategies must be matched with your goals like proper placement of your business contact information, an eye-catching slideshow on the homepage features products and sales properly placed on every page of the website and prominent of CTAs to catch the visitor’s attention.
Firstly find out if your website design company plans to analyze the current site’s metrics to evaluate the strength and weaknesses before making any design changes.
It is the most important question to ask and to use in the evaluation process. This can either be a good or bad thing, if the company has designed the website in the past similar to yours, they might have some better knowledge of what works the best and what doesn’t.
A website design and development process includes research, design, site development, and launch and evaluate. While asking the questions, do remember to ask who will be the specific person you will be in touch with, what will be the timelines for the different phases in the development process, in which way you will get progress reports and is there any project management system going to manage the tasks.
Planning out the website is the key to ensure its success. It requires researching in the industry, do a basic market analysis, before planning the functionality, content structure, element, and other things.
Make sure you know every individual of the team who is working on your website project to understand how your project will be managed.
Also, it is important to know the experience level of your web project team along with the updated portfolio and references of their latest work.
Typically the website project timeline depends on the work required and how fast you can provide them with the required information. It will be worthy to discuss what they will do if they don’t meet their deadline.
Search engines love the websites which contain various pages and rich content. Normally a website has About Us, Contact Us, FAQs, and Terms & Conditions and other pages like blogs, services, testimonials, products will be decided according to your business type.
Obviously, you are going to provide the Web Design and Development team the text, images, content and other required things for your site and if you want the content to be done by the web design company’s copywriters then you need to give them a brief detail about the nature of your work.
Ask you Web Design Company how appealing they can make the logo for your website, seek for their experience in this area and look for their other logos created by them.
Providing real pictures for your business is the best to get that unique factor in your website but in case if you don’t have any then ask the web design firm if they access to the public domain images or you need to pay royalty fees for it.
Often web design companies outsource for the certain phases of your web project. If they do so, then ask for all the necessary details of them and how project coordination will be handled in-house.
The pricing structure is of two types, flat project price, and second hourly rate. But do understand that prices depend on experience, expertise, and scope of the project.
The second most important thing to ask is that what are the items included in the prices and what is not.
Read here How you can set budget for your website
Find out the most important factor and that is whether your website is responsive and compatible enough with smartphones, tablets and mobile devices or not.
Nowadays every websites are coded with SEO in mind. So if you are designing a new website, it’s better to get a third party SEO firm do an SEO audit prior to launch to ensures that there are no technical issues.
To have the right keywords on every page of your website is the necessary SEO marketing component. It would be great for the third party SEO firm to not only do a site audit but also the keyword study.
Ask your web design company about the experience as who will be providing SEO and SEM services and the strategies applied.
Ask them about the type of CMS used either third-party system of the custom built one. Also find out if it’s web based interface supports WordPress and other e-commerce platforms, compatible with all browsers.
If you do not know how to use the live CMS then ask if they offer training for it.
A web design and development company should follow latest design trends and web development standards so that your website functions in all web browsers and operating systems.
Well here are some major questions you should ask before hiring any web design company and ensures you get a result-oriented partner to help you get the desired results which can give a measurable return on your website investment.
Read Here: Is It the Right Time to Revamp Your Website