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8 Things You MUST Know Before Hiring A Web Designer

There are a few things you must know before hiring a web designer, so that your business website can work hard for you and will not go to waste. You're paying for your website -- as a shrewd businessperson, you'd want to get all the benefits from it. These are really simple things. Let's get started.

• Whether Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is included

  Okay, this is NOT normally included by most web designers (hey, some may not even know about SEO). But you should still ask of course.

  Simply put, SEO is the process of making the text content (words and phrases) of a web page match what Internet users look for, and also help a site to gain high visibilty (ranking) in search results. For more details on search engine optimization, see here.

  If the service is included, it probably will just be simple on-site SEO, but it's better than nothing at all. Ask what type of optimization will be done. If it's something like "Meta tags will be created for all pages", then it's still not good enough. A basic SEO should include optimization of meta tag (description), page title, header text and body text -- for ALL content pages.

• How is the quality of the work (visually)

  Visual appeal is very subjective. Have a look at the past projects or designs, if no sample is shown on the web design firm's site, then go elsewhere. Also, remember, the price does not indicate the quality of the design that you'll get! You may pay standard market rate yet get a bad design.

• The price/fee

  Shop around. Most web design firms are not willing to publish their fees online. Ask them! Again, remember, the price does not guarantee the delivered quality. For a small or medium business, a standard site (brochure site) with ORIGINAL design should be around RM1000 or less. Template based website should of course cost much lesser -- it depends on the web design firm.

• Template based or original design

  Original design is unique. A template based design is, well, based on a ready made template -- the designer just changes some colours and images (and your business details of course).

  Prices vary depending on the web design firm. An ORIGINAL design should cost you around RM1000 or less.

  A template based website should then logically cost much less than an original design.

• How will your content be displayed

  You're normally required to provide the business details to be included in your website. But will the web developer just use everything as-is? Or is he/she capable of at least adding some value, by editing your content for clarity and to weed out major errors (typo, grammar, syntax etc)? You don't need perfect English for your website to work. But the quality of the writing should at least be acceptable to the general public.

• XHTML/CSS based or Table based layout design

  A lot has been said about the advantages of XHTML/CSS based layout design, by a lot of experts. So, we'll not go into details here. For a new website, never accept table based layout design -- tables should only be used for displaying tabular data, NOT for design layout.

  Some advantages of XHTML/CSS based design: recommended by W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium), faster loading (it's leaner), search engine friendly (accessible and uncluttered code), more accessible to other devices instead of just the PC, easy maintenance/updates, future-compatible even with yet to be invented devices (as XHTML is based on XML, the standard specification for mark-up languages).

  How to check if a web page is using the old Table based design:

  Right click on a webpage, then click "View Source", the source code will be displayed (do not be intimidated). Scroll around -- if you see lots of "table", "td" or "tr" codes, then you know it's table based layout design. See example below.

  

• Updates and Maintenance

  Ask how your website will be updated. Free updates for a year? Six months? How much is maintenance contract per year?

• Web hosting

  Web design and web hosting are two different things. Web design is the service of creating your web pages. While web hosting providers provide you with computer space (24hours connected to the internet) for storing your web pages.

  Sometimes the two functions overlap, some web hosting providers provide design services, and some web designers provide hosting services.

  It's convenient if your web designer provides you with web hosting service. But you should be aware that web designers may just re-sell hosting services that they lease from primary web hosting providers, these designers DO NOT own any web servers or data centers.

  The best for you is to register web hosting and domain name services with reliable primary web hosting providers. They are focused on providing hosting services. Therefore, you can have better peace of mind. Furthermore, your hosting and domain name will be fully under your control and you have direct access to the real hosting provider. Get a web designer to only do the designing and updates/maintenance.

  For small and medium businesses, the cheapest hosting plan should suffice.

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