Web Design Guide

and how to filter out the bad designers

For anyone who doesn’t understand websites and how they work, finding a decent web designer can be quite daunting… How do you know if they know what they’re talking or if they’re just blowing hot air? When web designers start throwing around web jargon and terms, you assume they know what they’re doing. However I must tell you there are so many bad, or just inexperienced, designers out there who charge an arm and a leg for a bad website (or a website that looks good on the outside, but has been built wrong). A bad website can actually do harm to your business. If it takes too long to load, potential clients might leave. If it is built very badly, Google could ban your website and then no one will find it unless they go directly.

I have set aside some important points that you should check before hiring a web designer:

Websites are not cheap

If you see web companies/freelancers offering a full website for R1,000 or R150 per page, beware! These are usually VERY bad websites, taken from a bad template with a bad design. Don’t waste your time… If you are serious about getting your business a good reputation online, you need to pay more than R1,000. A survey showed that average/bad designers charge anything from R1000 – R2000 for a whole website, while experienced designers charge R5,000 +. Obviously there are lots of things to determine the price of a website, especially its’ size, but I’d say a basic brochure website (5 – 10 pages) should cost between R5,000 – R10,000 from a freelance web designer (a good company will probably charge a lot more). This includes design and build.

It’s just like cars… if you take a cheap, cruddy car, it’s bound to break down and give you a hernia.

What will the website be built in?

The quickest way to catch out a bad web designer is to ask them what they build their websites in. There are two options: tables or divs. If they say tables, get out of there… This is an outdated and very bad way of building websites. All good designers build in divs (and putting a table in the div doesn’t count! Table should only be used for tabular data). There’s one other option, frames! If a designer ever mentions or does this to your website, they have no idea what they are doing. This is even more outdated than tables and literally does nothing for your website.

Putting your website in tables/frames is like running your petrol car on diesel – it won’t work.

Are they making sure all visitors see your website?

During the building process of your website (after the design has been approved) there are several things a designer does to make sure all visitors see your website. The most important is cross-browser checks. In case you don’t know, a browser is the software you use to browse the Internet. The most common browser is Internet Explorer. Other browsers include Firefox, Safari and Opera. All browsers, and the previous versions of each, sometimes read websites differently. If your website isn’t built correctly for the main browsers and the older versions of each, the whole website could break, or important things on your website might display incorrectly, like your menu. Make sure your designer accompanies Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+ and Safari.

Other things they should take into consideration are screen sizes (anyone who designs 800×600 doesn’t know what they’re doing – again, outdated info!). The designs’ width should not exceed 1000px. Length doesn’t matter. 99% of websites scroll and people don’t mind. Get the idea that people hate to scroll out of your head.

Will the website have valid HTML and CSS?

Asking this simple question should immediately reveal if they know what they’re talking about… however, if you think they’re lying, ask to check out one of their previous websites and validate it yourself. You can validate their HTML here: http://validator.w3.org/. Just type in their homepage URL (mine is http://creativeaddict.co.za). If it displays a green ‘Pass’, it’s valid. You can check if the style sheet is valid if you know the URL. Usually it’s “/style.css” after their homepage URL but can easily be something else. Anyway, if you find out the URL for their style sheet, you can validate it here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. One or two errors can be ignored, but anything more is a bad sign.

Do they optimise your website for SEO?

Please remember there is a big difference between doing basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for a website, and doing full-on professional SEO for a website. An experienced designer will know they need to do a few basic things to help your website get found properly by Google, but if you need proper SEO and marketing management for your website, you should consult an SEO Expert.

Basic SEO includes building the website in divs (as discussed earlier), giving each page unique and proper page titles (not just one word), using headings (h1, h2 etc.), naming images properly and giving them proper alt tags (when I say ‘proper’, I mean they image names and alt tags should be directly related to your products/services) and avoiding using images when you can use text, especially in menu’s and headings as well as creating a site map. These are really basic things any web designer can do.

Ignoring all the above mentioned means Google will ignore your website.

You should also not have to pay extra for them to do basic SEO! This should be part of the building process.

In closing…

These are good ways to pick out the good designers from the bad. Make sure they know what they are doing. I can’t stress how important paying for a good website is though… I know it might not make sense that a website can cost what I mentioned earlier but there are very good reasons for this. I will be discussing why websites cost what they do in detail soon.

If you have any further questions or want to question my own experience and talent, please contact me