In today’s digitized world, web designing plays a vital role in all companies. Their websites not only attract users but also help clients/customers to understand the products/services provided. In some cases, companies themselves may develop a small, in-house team by selecting a few skilled employees to work on web designing. But in most cases, they hire an outside web designing company for this task.
Simply choosing any web designing company without having proper knowledge about it may turn out to be disadvantageous. Before you choose a web design company as your marketing partner, you must have good knowledge about its working and ratings and you can conduct a survey to gauge the success rate of various companies that work in collaboration with the web design company, you plan to work on with.
Given below are various factors that you must keep in mind while choosing a web design company for your business:
- Work according to your budget: Before you sign on a web design project, keep your financial limitations in mind and the amount of money you can allocate for it. It is very important to make a clear cut budget for this purpose. However, keep the budget a little flexible, to ensure there is no issue in case the expenditure increases by 20-30%. This is because there could be unavoidable reasons why a financial overrun can happen amid a project. Depending upon your budget, make a list of web designing companies who would work within that budget. Go through various sites created by them before choosing the final one for your company.
- Information about the fee structure of the agency: Knowing the pricing alone may not be enough, because web designing companies may sometimes charge surprise fees, that may or may not be mentioned in the contract. Thus, before signing up with a particular company, you must have complete knowledge about their fee structure, or else you could find your company stuck with unexpected financial commitments. Once the financial problems have been addressed, we can now move to the next step.
- Learn from past clients: Established web design companies would have worked previously with other business firms too. You can go through these firms’ sites to see whether the web design company can meet your expectations or not. Every good web design company will themselves show the various sites on which they have worked as they usually maintain a portfolio of their work. In case they do not do so and hurry you in signing the contract, you could be getting into the wrong hands. In such a situation, you must choose a different web designing company.
- Rate of client retention: Today, all business firms are searching for agents to design an eye-catching and top-quality site. That is why web design has gained such popularity. But there are cases where the client company quits before completion of the task. This is reflected in the client retention rate of the web design company. Generally, all companies have a client retention rate somewhere between 60-70%. In case the rate of the company you propose to work with is below that, it could be a warning signal. There may have been issues that forced the previous companies to abandon the design project. You must investigate the retention figures properly before choosing a web design company.
- Customer support policy of the agency: Generally web design companies have a dedicated person for maintaining a site. He/She is the person whom you will need to contact in case your site is not getting the required attention and/or your business goals are not being achieved. Ensure that the contact person is human and not a robot. Another situation that has to be addressed is that of having the right substitute – sometimes the dedicated person may fall sick, go for a vacation, quit, go on leave, etc. In such a case, the web design company must provide you with alternatives in the form of another competent support person or team until the allotted person is back. Some web design companies may not make such arrangements. This is an important aspect to be kept in mind while selecting a web design partner.
- Site updates: Updating a site plays a very vital role. Some web design companies may give you access to a content management system or CMS so that you can update the information on your site yourself. But other companies may not give you that option and they may choose to update the content themselves. This is an aspect that depends on your needs, preferences and budget.
- Site Reallocation: The web design company could move your site to a completely new location under a different source in case they do not want to work with an existing hosting service. Thus, before signing the contract, you must make sure that reallocation does not take place without your consent. In case your site is being shifted with your consent, you must know where it will be shifted to, because it may affect the loading speed of your site. After all, you don’t want to wake up one day to find your site switched to a completely different address with a different user name and password and with unknown content!
Finally, don’t forget that you must fix a deadline with the web design company for the completion of their task. When you choose a company after having a thorough knowledge of their working strategy, you don’t have anything more to worry about. Just sit back and wait for your site to be hosted. Once it’s well hosted, it will start attracting viewers!
Thomas Digital is such a web designing company in San Francisco that designs top-quality marketing websites and other web products. This is a skill that does not have any particular geographical location, so it doesn’t matter whether you are in San Francisco or Australia or any other part of the world, you can choose a great web designing company to work for you, based on this important 7 point strategy.
