How to find a web designer?
Finding a good web designer for your needs can be a challenging task.
Professional web designers that have created some popular websites can charge you thousands of dollars for a few simple pages. On the other hand, designers that work at low rates can make for you a website that probably won’t meet your requirements.
There are a few steps, however, that you can follow to make sure a web-designer is suitable for the needs of your website.
1. Check his/her portfolio website. You should like the site itself. After all, if a designer cannot produce a quality website for him/herself, how will s/he make your pages look good?
2. In the portfolio of the designer, check the websites s/he has created before. Each designer has his/her own style. Whether it will match your needs can be seen from his/her previous projects.
3. Browse the websites the designer has created with different browsers. A good designer will make a website look equally good on different browsers. This is something very important since nowadays people use many different browsers.
4. Check how the sites of your designer rank in Google and the other search engines. Nowadays SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is a must-do and cannot be overlooked. A good designer should produce pages with a clear structure that are easy for the search engines to crawl.
5. Avoid using designers that produce Flash-only websites. Such sites do not rank high in the search engines which will affect the popularity of your pages.
6. Ask the designer about the intellectual property ownership of the website. The ownership should be yours and you should not pay the original designer additionally if you want to make changes in your pages.
7. You should check whether your designer uses a WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) program (like Dreamweaver for example) to create websites or makes templates for CMS(Content Management System) applications. If you want a simple website with several pages that describe your company, you should not go for a complex CMS system.
On the other hand, if you want a dynamic website that will have its information updated regularly, you should choose a designer that works with a CMS.
Finally, check in forums and web design websites for more information about a certain designer or a design company.