12 Tips to Finding The Best Website Designer and Developer for Your Business

With a pool of amazingly talented web designers, choosing the best one to fit the purpose and motive of your company can be a huge challenge. However, if you’re thinking of hiring the best website designer and developer, we can help. We have worked with companies both big and small, and we have gathered tips on how your company can find the best website designer and developer that fits the needs of your company.

So, if you are ready, then let’s dive into it:

How to Choose The Best Website Designer and Development Team:

1. Know Who You Want To Work With

What is the best website designer and developer for you?

To find the best website designer, there are quite a few areas to cover. Understanding the different roles, and areas of a website build will help you find the best website designer for you.

The Designer

To understand who will be the best website designer or developer for you, it is best to understand the different roles. The designer will create the design, colours, fonts and how the layout of pages will look. To find the best website designer for your business, it will be important to see previous design work created by the designer.

The Developer

Before doing anything, you want to make sure that you understand the kind of developer you want, and make sure that it is aligned with your goal. Website developers and designers tend to have a variety of skills under their belt; some are backend developers, others are front-end developers, and then we have the full-stack developers. What do they mean?

Back end developer

Well, if you want someone capable of writing code that helps your website interact with visitors, and with a database or server, then you should hire a back-end developer. A back-end developer deals with how things work on your website. For example, a back-end developer will be responsible for writing code that change the price of the inventory on your website, depending on whether you’re running a promotion or not. Usually, most back-end developers tend to specialize in PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, and many more languages

Front end developer

On the other hand, if you want someone capable of writing code that determine how your website interface looks on various devices, then you need to hire a front-end developer. A front-end developer is responsible for how things look on your website. For example, while a back-end developer can write codes to change the price of your inventory, a front-end developer will write codes that determine how the prices are displayed. This could include, where you want the prices positioned, the size, color, and many more. Usually, a front-end developer specializes in HTML, JavaScript, React, JQuery, and many more.

Full stack developer

Finally, we have full-stack developers. These are people who are specialized in both back-end and front-end development. So, they can determine how your website works, and how it looks. And they specialize in every programming language.

Project Manager

So often the role of the project manager is over looked when people are searching for the best website designer or developer. But without a solid project management plan, the website project could fail. Only the best website design agencies understand the importance of project management within the process.

2. Ask For Their Portfolio

After you know who you want to work with, you want to know what their previous record. This is essential because you do not just want to hire any team, or anyone to join your team. You want to make sure that the person(s) you hire is credible, hardworking, flexible, and experienced. And how do you know all these? Well, by taking a look at their portfolio. A portfolio gives you a run-down of previous work done by an individual or team. So, by taking a look at their portfolio, you get to see if they have worked on similar projects to what you want and you would also determine if they have the skill you need.

Seeing previous work and also speaking with past clients will help you choose the best website designer.

3. SEO Is Essential!

The best website designer and developer for you will understand SEO. You want to make sure that whoever is working on your website understands what SEO is and how it works, and how to integrate it into your website. SEO goes beyond optimizing the content on your page. You also want to make sure that the website you develop is well-optimized for SEO too. In this day and age, having an optimized website that is fast, mobile-friendly, and interactive is crucial if you want your website to rank higher on the search engine results page. This is because they boost the UI and UX of your website which is an important metric in SEO.

4. Understanding Google Analytics

The best website designer and developer for you will be very familiar with Google Analytics. Also, you want to make sure that whoever you are working with understands how Google analytics data work, and also be able to give you access to these analytics. You want them to not only give you access but teach you how to look at it, understand which pages on your website visitors interact with the most, and interact with the least. Because with this info, you can know how to target your services or ads to these pages and understand what your visitors want.

This way, it makes it easy for other web designers or developers to step in and make the necessary changes should the need be– just in case you fire the previous one.

Common Mistakes When Hiring a Website Design Company:

5. Not Making Sure You Own The Domain

The best website designer and developer will respect your domain ownership. This is a common mistake made by businesses that need a website for the first time. What happens is that they allow the web design company to buy the domain for them, as a result, the web design company registers the domain in their name and all they give you is just a website without ownership to the domain,

The domain is like the address to your website, and just like your home address, you want to make sure that you own your domain. so, owning it becomes crucial to your website when you need to move your domain name to a new host, or even change the name.

So, we highly recommend you buy your domain name, or when you allow your design agency to handle everything, make sure that they buy the domain in your name.

6. Make Sure You Have Access To The Draft Of Your Website

The best website designer and developer will build your new site on a development or staging domain. Avoid trusting everything into the hands of the designer, make sure that they give you access to the draft of the website before it goes live. The draft of your website is just the website without it being published. When you have access to that you can break the website down to see what works for you, what doesn’t, and also make corrections when needed.

You do not want your website going live with mistakes, or you later want to make those corrections. The earlier changes are during the draft, the easier those changes are to make.

With this, you want to make sure that you thoroughly check all the images, the links, the copy, because once it’s published on the internet, there is a memory of it. Also, when you first publish your site, the first crawl Google makes is the assumption it will have about your site. So, you want to make sure that whatever assumptions are being made is what you want. By choosing the best website designer, you will ensure best practices are followed.

7. Not Setting a Budget For Marketing.

The best website designer and developer will understand the need for marketing your website. Yes, building the website is important. However, another crucial aspect you want to consider is your marketing. This has to do with promoting your business. So, you do not want to set all your budget on just building your website, but you also want to set some aside on promoting the website once it’s live to get people to interact with it.

You want to make sure that the website you create gets to the right audience, and you can only do this by marketing your website.

8. Not Getting Access To Your Files

The best website designer and developer will be happy to give you secure access to your files and backups. You want to make sure that whoever is working on your website is writing codes that are easy to read and understand. Yes, we know all you want is just a running website, however, you must be able to get access to the source files of your website. Source files are the actual files/ templates a designer or design company will use to create your website design. And you want to make sure that you have these files just in case you want to make any necessary changes to your website or hand over the project to someone to continue.

9. Getting Ripped Off

The best website designer and developer will offer website care plans and support. It is really important to have a well maintained website, but that includes far more than just hosting. Some web design agencies tend to charge a large amount for web hosting. But truth be told, web hosting isn’t that expensive. If you are asked to pay $100 per month for only hosting your website, then they are ripping you off. However paying $100 per month for a website care plan that includes off site backups, updates, uptime monitoring, security etc is really good value.

Every website design company is a business, and they are in to make a profit, so some make it a goal to maximize on the ignorance of the customer, and then charging them exorbitant prices for hosting. So, you want to understand why your web designer is charging you what they charge.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are paying let’s say $100 for things like maintenance, uptime and downtime, security, and hosting, then that’s a good deal, However, if it is just $100 for just hosting, then you are getting ripped off.

10. Do You Need A Website Redesign or an Update?

The best website designer and developer will help you decide if you need a redesign or just an update. If you’ve owned a website for a while, you are probably wondering if you should redesign your website or if you should update your website. We will take you through a couple of metrics that will show you when you need an update, and when you need a redesign.

When You Need A Website Redesign:

First of all, what does a website redesign mean?

If you are redesigning your website, then it means you are changing the entire code and layout of your website. So, you need a website redesign if:

• If you need different functionality for your website or if you need to change the branding of your website
• If the website has poor usability, thus isn’t responsive and interactive leading to customers not being engaged
• If your website isn’t driving in traffic now and also in the future.
• If your website isn’t mobile-friendly. This is because about 52% of all web traffic is from mobile phones.
• Your website is over 4 years old

When You Need A Website Update:

Updating a website is just like changing the painting of your home without tearing down the walls or the design of the home. Generally, it is recommended that you update your website every 2 years to keep up with the change in technology and search engine updates.

So, your website needs an update if:

• If your the content of your website isn’t SEO-friendly
• If your is less than 3 years old, then you probably just need an update instead of a redesign.
• If your website doesn’t generate leads.
• If your website isn’t easy to navigate, then you need an update.

11. How Much Would It Cost You to Build a Website?

Choosing the best website designer and developer may be more expensive than hiring someone just starting out. You will need to decide if you are looking for a return on investment (ROI) and a website that produces results or if you are just wanting a template site with no customisations, SEO, lead generation etc. Depending on what you need from a website, the prices can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For a website to run successfully, there are three main things to consider:

• Domain name
• Hosting account
• Website

The prices of each are going to depend on whether your website is a custom-based website or a template-based website? However, the best website designer and developer will not be using templates to build your site. Your site will be built from the ground up. At PurpleCow Digital Marketing we have a very specific website design process we follow to deliver high quality, highly converting websites.

With a custom-built website, you are usually building a website from scratch such that it is coded to meet the needs of your business. A custom-designed website is recommended for big companies that need a very unique, high-quality, and very responsive site. To build such a website with a domain, and hosting account, you can expect an upfront fee of $6000, and a yearly maintenance cost of $ 1000. However, prices go up depending on the functionalities you want.

With a template-based site, on the other hand, you do not need any experience in coding; you can do this all by yourself. These sites tend to be time-saving and less expensive. These websites tend to be less responsive, and not as interactive and unique as a custom-built website will be. To build such a website with a domain and, you can expect an upfront cost between $30 to $300. However, prices can also go much higher. When choosing the best website designer and developer for your project, make sure you ask if they are creating a custom design or are they using a template. You wouldn’t want to pay someone any more than $4000 to use a template website.

12. What are the Various Works a Designer Can Offer:

The best website designer and developers aren’t just limited to building and designing websites. They may also offer the following:

• UX designing
• UI designing
• Website content manager
• Multimedia and SEO specialist
• Application and game developers

So, I hope now, you are confident enough to go out there and choose the best website designer and developer for your website. If you have any questions or found this helpful, feel free email us st******@pu*******.digital

If you’d like to ensure you have the best website designer and developer for your web project, download our free Hire the best website designer and developer checklist

For more information on how we can help your business simply fill out our Website Worksheet here. PurpleCow Digital Marketing work with the best small to medium businesses that are passionate and ready to take their business to the next level. If you would like to book a time to have a chat, just head to my calendar here to make a booking.

At PurpleCow Digital Marketing we are confident we are the best website designer and development team. We build beautiful and function custom design websites. See our designs here.