Thousands of websites sprout up each day, so do web designing companies. Amidst all this chaos and competition, it becomes tough for a beginner to choose the right web designing company for his/her website. Competition is rising everywhere; in digital space however, it’s much faster and unrelenting than anywhere else. In order to succeed in this congesting space, you need a website that stands out and compels your audience to buy and stay connected. For that, you need web developers who understand your ideas and vision and are able to translate them into a highly functional and visually appealing website.
Knowing what you want is utmost important when you are on the lookout for the perfect web designer. In this post, we have compiled a list of things to keep in mind while looking for the best web design company , have a look –
Step 1: Know what you want
Not knowing what you want is the number one reason of dissatisfaction with the results. You need to carefully consider all your requirements and goals – both long term and short term and your metrics of success. You must know what you want and how exactly you want it. For example, if you want an e-commerce website, ROI and user experience should be your top priorities; if you want a blog or a personal brand website, style and tone is your requirement.
Different web designing companies specialize in different kinds of websites. Now that you know what you want, you can find the right company to get it.
Step 2: Setting up your budget
There is literally no limit of how much you can spend on a website. After figuring out your aims and objectives from the website comes the time of setting up your budget.
“You get what you pay for” sounds true when it comes to availing web designing services. But there is a catch; a well-designed website has the ability to cover up its cost and beyond that by giving you good ROI. While you may to choose to save some money now and get a mediocre website or you can choose to act smart and get the best your budget can afford.
When it comes to deciding the budget, don’t focus entirely on money, focus on value and return on investment.
Step 3: Find an agency with the right track record.
When looking for a web designing agency, don’t focus on the years they have spent working, focus on their quality of work. Work done in past is a great indicator of agency’s creative caliber and their ability to deliver your project on time. If you are unsure about a particular agency’s quality of service, you can find out the clients it has served in past and ask them about it or you can ask the agency itself to provide such contacts and dig into this further
This step is one of the most crucial steps of finding the right agency and must be given the time and effort it deserves.
Step 4: Communicating your ideas and demands as clearly as possible.
It usually happens that clients give work to agencies and talk to them only when the first draft is presented, which is often not the most fruitful approach.
It’s always better to keep the lines of communication open throughout the life-cycle of the process; it serves both parties and results in better, more efficient work. If your agency doesn’t like this approach, find the one who does. You want to have complete participation in the creative and execution process of your website.
Step 5: Testing the website
Web testing is one of the most critical steps in the entire web development process; it is also a key differentiator between a professional and a rookie website.
Your website should be completely absent of bugs and must perform well under different circumstances. To make sure it delivers what it must, thorough web testing is required at both ends –yours and the web developer’s.
Here are some tests and quality checks your website must go through before getting live.
- Speed Tests: Your website should be snappy when it comes to load times. Ideally, your load times should be well under 3 to 5 seconds. Sites such as Facebook have a 1.8 – 2 seconds to first byte which includes a good portion of content on page; they ajax the rest in the next 1-2 seconds. Make sure your website delivers on this parameter. It’s crucial to your website’s traffic and click through rates.
- Performance tests: Performance tests verify each part of the web server or the web application and discover how best to optimize them. Most often it is done by testing the speed of various implementations of a single web page/script and ruling out the fastest.
- Load Tests: What’s load testing? It is where realistic (or hyper realistic) workloads are specified or simulated to your website. Load testing’s goal is to determine the maximum time it should take to load all elements of the page.
- Stress Tests: Power of handling enormous load of traffic should be looked at with high speed. If you’re planning to go big with your website, it must be able to handle all that pressure. And to make sure this happens, proper stress testing is required. Stress testing estimates the maximum loads your web servers can support. Stress testing is done through “brute force” attacks that apply excessive loads to your web server.
- Penetration Tests: Penetration tests determine the security of your website. It is the practice of subjecting your website to ‘white hat’ hacking to root out the vulnerabilities that bad guys might exploit. Different strategies are used – targeted testing, external testing, internal testing, blind testing, double blind testing etc.
Getting your web designed is an expensive, resource hungry and a time consuming process for both you and the web developer. Following these steps will make sure you get the right product and quality of service that you paid for, and that you and the web developer are satisfied with the final product.
John Buzz says
Very nice information while choosing website design company. It should be good for both customers and company to satisfy their needs.
Akshay Joshi says
Thank you for your valuable comment John