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Hiring Professionals - 5 Things to Look For

FREE ARTICLE #8

So you've decided that it might be best to leave web design to the professionals, have you? Well, the unfortunate thing about web design professionals is that not all of them are exactly professional. Some of them are working from wildly out of date knowledge, and, well, some of them are working from their parents' basement.

How can you protect yourself when you decide to hire a professional? Well, here are some guidelines.

Qualifications are Meaningless.

Web design is a new enough industry that what qualifications there are have ended up being largely stupid and meaningless. I've never met a good designer who has a qualification in web design - a qualification in proper graphical design is, of course, something else entirely.

You can guarantee that most people with web design qualifications did them at a community college to try and get rich during the dot-com boom. These people know nothing about web design.

What you should pay attention to when you're looking at web designers is which of their skills they think are important. If they're marketing their Flash expertise to you, you probably don't want to hire them. If they can competently explain what XHTML and CSS are and why they're good for your website, then they're a better candidate.

The Portfolio.

The easiest way to tell whether the designer you're considering is any good or not is to take a look at their portfolio. Good designers will have a diverse portfolio, with plenty of attractive sites that they've built for all sorts of customers, and they'll be able to explain to you why they built each site the way they did.

If the designer doesn't have a substantial portfolio yet, you shouldn't write them off there and then – but do say that you're going to need to see something before you commit yourself. A good designer will happily do a first-draft design for one of your pages just to show themselves off.

If you're happy with what they've done, then the chances are that they've got the rest of the design in their head, ready to code up and send to you.

Usability is Vital.

You should make sure that the designer you're talking to realises that they're building your website for users - all users, no matter how they want to use it or which web browser they have. Amateur web designers have a tendency to come up with things that they think are impressive-looking, either visually or technically, while ignoring who the website is actually for - your visitors.

Some questions to ask the designer include:

  • Which browsers are you going to test with?
    (They should reply with 'as many as possible').
  • What is the purpose of my website?
    (They should be able to explain the point of the site simply).

Setting a Price.

Many web designers simply have no idea what kind of price to charge for their services. If you post a project to a freelance site where designers can bid on it, you'll get bids ranging from $50 to $5,000. Both ends are pretty obviously ridiculous.

At one end, you've got kids with no experience and Indians who don't speak English; at the other, you're paying pointless committees to have meetings for a week.

Your best bet is to find someone professional but independent, experienced but not corporate, and with a price that reflects the quality of their portfolio. As with all things in life, though, don't be afraid to negotiate - and never agree to let them do however much work it takes and pay by the hour.

Hosting Offers.

Finally, beware of web designers who are trying to sell you a whole package, together with a domain name, web hosting, and the rest. Operations like this are almost always flawed in one area or the other, since designers aren't really very technical people on the whole.

They'll either be web hosting specialists who think design is so easy anyone can do it, or they'll be designers who are reselling some cheap hosting package for a premium.

On the web, it's better to buy hosting yourself.

WEB DESIGN INDEX LISTING

SITE MAP

  1. 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website
  2. How the Web Works
  3. Registering a Domain Name
  4. The Confusing World of Web Hosting - Making Your Decision
  5. How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat
  6. Websites and Web logs - What's the Difference?
  7. What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
  8. Hiring Professionals - 5 Things to Look For
  9. Working With Templates
  10. Building a Budget Website
  11. There's More than One Web Browser
  12. Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More
  13. The Many Flavours of HTML
  14. Clean Page Structure - Headings and Lists
  15. The Importance of Validation
  16. Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts - Content Management Software
  17. FrontPage - Easy Pages
  18. Dreamweaver - The Professional Touch
  19. What You See Isn't Always What You Get
  20. Why Doing It Yourself is Best
  21. Understanding Web Jargon
  22. Don't Be Scared, It's Only Code - HTML for Beginners
  23. 5 Steps to Understanding HTML
  24. Taking HTML Further
  25. Finding a Good HTML Editor
  26. CSS and the End of Tables
  27. Column Designs with CSS
  28. The Basics of Web Servers
  29. LAMP - The Most Popular Server System Ever
  30. IIS and ASP - Microsoft's Server
  31. Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer
  32. How Databases Work
  33. Which Database is Right for You?
  34. Uploading Your Website with FTP
  35. PHP - Easy Dynamic Websites
  36. Perl - Cryptic Power
  37. ColdFusion - Quicker Scripting, at a Price
  38. JSP - Java on Your Server
  39. Python and Ruby - the Newer Alternatives
  40. Taking HTML Further with Javascript
  41. VBScript - Javascript Made Easy
  42. AJAX - Should You Believe the Hype?
  43. The Web Designer's Toolbox
  44. An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro
  45. Photoshop - a Graphic Designer's Dream
  46. Free Graphics Alternatives
  47. How to Install and Configure a Forum
  48. Building Online Communities
  49. Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic
  50. Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
  51. Putting Multimedia to Good Use
  52. Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software
  53. 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments
  54. Encryption & Security with SSL
  55. The Basics of Web Forms
  56. 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better
  57. The Web is Not Paper
  58. Writing for the Web
  59. A Question of Scroll Bars
  60. Titles and Headlines - It's Not a Newspaper
  61. All About Design - Principles and Elements
  62. Designing for Search Engines
  63. Printing and Sending - the Two Things Users Want to Do
  64. The Art of the Logo
  65. Picking a Colour Scheme
  66. Fonts are More Important Than You Think
  67. Beware the Stock Photographer - Picking Your Pictures
  68. The Smaller, the Better - Avoiding Graphical Overload
  69. An Issue of Width - the Resolution Problem
  70. Why Word is Bad for the Web
  71. The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation
  72. Focus on the User - Task-Oriented Websites
  73. Making Searches Simple
  74. Time for User Testing
  75. Hints All the Way
  76. The Case Against Flash
  77. Using Flash Sensibly
  78. The Evils of PDF's
  79. Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away
  80. 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look
  81. Content is King
  82. Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format
  83. Cut to the Chase - How to Make Your Website Load Faster
  84. How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy
  85. Ads Under the Radar - Linking to Affiliates
  86. Text Ads - Unobtrusive Advertising
  87. The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
  88. Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions
  89. 10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
  90. Making Friends and Influencing People - the Importance of Links
  91. How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs
  92. Tracking Your Visitors
  93. RSS - Really Simple Syndication
  94. Taking Your Website Mobile
  95. Registering Your Users by Stealth
  96. How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favourites
  97. Setting Up a Mailing List
  98. Designing for Sales
  99. It's a World Wide Web - Going International
  100. Some Places to Go For More Information

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