Finding the right company to design or radically overhaul a website is incredibly difficult. It shouldn’t be, but it somehow is.
In theory you just need to find someone who can produce what you want for a reasonable price. But all too often you’ll find companies who don’t reply to emails, don’t read the brief you send them, can’t follow simple instructions and can’t/won’t/don’t provide exactly what you’ve asked for.
To add salt to the wound, most (if not all) web design companies try to create web sites that just look good.
Looking good isn’t enough.
A well designed website needs three things.
It needs to look good, to contain good content, and to be correctly optimised – both for the search engines and visitors.
All three factors are equally important.
Let’s start at the beginning. If your website doesn’t rank well in the search engines, you’re never going to pull-in anyone who’s looking for what you sell.
If your website confuses your visitors so that they have no idea what to do next, it doesn’t matter how much targeted traffic you get from Google each day, most of it will amount to nothing.
If the appearance of your website is so horrible that people want to leave the moment they arrive, then it doesn’t matter how well optimised the content may be, your visitors will follow their instincts.
And if the content of your website doesn’t impress your visitors, then everything else is pointless.
Take a quick look at your website. Try to look at it neutrally, or better still get someone who isn’t familiar with your site or business to do it for you.
Three questions to ask: Does it look good? Is it optimised? Is the content good?
If you know a web designer who ticks all the above boxes, hang on to them for dear life. They’re one in a billion.
