Web designers

Most web sites contribute next to nothing to their owners. Some Why is that?

There is a definite sense in which anyone can design a web site. Although a lot is made of it by some techies HTML is a relatively easy way of coding text and there are a large number of web development tool available for aspiring web designers - all the way from the ubiquitous Microsoft Front Page through to sophisticated tools like Adobe Dreamweaver (originally created by Macromedia). You can learn to use those from simple guides, in evening classes or as part of a degree course.

However , if you actually want your web site to be an important part of your business that is a very different matter. Basically very few web designers learn the real skills needed to make a business a commercial success. Things like the underlying rules used by search engines change on a month-to-month basis while web designers depend on knowledge learned from college courses  months or years ago. what's worse the college courses themselves are often designed by academics with no actual experience of making commercial web sites using skills and information that may be years out of date.

Choosing a web designer.

A web designer should have access to up to date skills and knowledge.

There are a whole range of skills that a web designer (or a web design team) might need. Some are taught well in college or university courses (like CSS, HTML, PHP, ASP, .net etc). Others like AdWord optimization. Search Engine Optimization, Usability and maximizing sales from the site are hardly taught at all to Web designers. Even where they are may be so out of date when taught as to be meaningless in the current on-line environment. Web designers need to be not just up to date, but have access to the very latest commercial research and training materials related to these more difficult, but less academic skills that are essential for your commercial success.

A web designer should have professionalism.

Time after time projects are stalled because they have been put into the hands of a friend or relative for whom the site is a low priority or perhaps a student or freelance website designer who comes in cheap, but fades out when they go off to get a real job and forgets your project. Decide if your project is a hobby or a business and plan to invest appropriately. Ask if your designer can give the site 100% of their time until it is launched and then guaranteed time slots if it is successful.

A web designer should work as part of a team that has good portfolio.

The web designers portfolio is not just about pretty designs. It's about showing that they know what they are doing. The first time any web designer does a particular job  it might take hours to do things the first time and days to get things right. An experienced designer doing the same job the fifth or tenth time should take just minutes and should get it right 100% - rather than just "sort of right". A successful site will consist of dozens of jobs like that - covering everything from best and most useable page layout to spam-proof web forms (i.e. forms on your site that spammers can't use to send you thousands of spam emails or worse - but very common - use your site to send spam that looks like it comes from you).

A web designer should work as part of a team that has access to a range of professional skills.

The lone techie who can do it all will not make good use of your time. Someone who is an expert in technical programming skills such as PHP or page layout skills such as CSS will be very unlikely to be experienced in Graphic Design or Designing the text on your page. It takes just minutes for an intelligent and technically competent person to set up many shopping carts, but get things just right, configure everything effectively and track down problems and bugs to make them into an an effective and bug-free online shop can take the same person months the first time. This reduces to days with experience not just of setting up multiple stores but of running them over a period of months. You'll need to make sure that the experience is not gained at your expense.