I ran into a friend of mine recently and found out that he hired a local designer to build a website for his wife’s privately owned company. I asked to see what they built for him and I have to say I was appalled. It was clearly built by someone who considered themself a web designer, but the site was “amateurish” at best.

This is a pet peave of mine. There are many people that can build a basic website, some of which turn out some really nice designs, however, what good is it if nobody can find it?

With tools such as FrontPage and GoLive it doesn’t take much for a novice designer to launch a site and lay claim to being a web designer or developer, but there is much more to building a successful site than looks. Does the site have functionality or interactivity? Is the user interface intuitive and easy to navigate? Does the site provide the information people are looking for? Does it display the same or is it compatible with Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and other browsers? How quickly does the site load on a dialup internet connection? These are all things that need to be considered and only a seasoned designer will be able to meet all of these objectives, but the most important question of all is - can anybody find my website?

I have seen people pay a decent sum of money for a site that looks nice, but other than that is lacks in one or more of the objectives previously mentioned. What I find really disturbing though is how many so-called web designers don’t include the basic tags needed to rank high on search engines. Any decent designer knows that title tags, along with keyword and description meta-tags are crucial to a web site’s success. The designers at our company also know many other tips and tricks to increase your ranking with search engines and are experienced with online marketing campaigns, such as Google AdWords. We also do a lot of analysis and metrics gathering to track our customers’ web traffic over time.

Before you hire a web designer find out what services they are going to provide. If its only a website, email and a few other basic options, you might want to find out what if any other services they provide and shop around a bit. What you will find is that our prices are competitive with many of the smaller design firms in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and local suburbs, but our level of service and quality are on par with much larger companies…give us a call today or contact us online for a free quote…what do you have to lose.

Cheers!

Jeff of the Doylestown Designs Team