How to Choose a Web Design Company: 10 Questions to Ask
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Choosing a website designer is a big decision. Your website is one of the first places potential customers interact with your business, and the web design company you hire will have a major influence on how that first impression looks, feels, and performs.
The tricky part is knowing how to choose a web design company when so many agencies make similar promises.
A polished portfolio can look impressive, but it does not tell you anything about what the process may be like while collaborating with them, or how happy you’ll be by the end.
That’s why hiring a web design agency should involve more than comparing prices or scrolling through a few homepage designs. The right questions can help you make a more confident decision in your website redesign partner!
Use the following guide as a practical web design agency checklist while interviewing local web agencies
Questions to Ask a Web Designer BEFORE You Hire Them
When you are learning how to choose a web design company, start by checking the basics: experience, consistency, and who is actually behind the work. Before getting into platforms, pricing, or features, these first questions to ask a web designer can help you determine whether the company has a proven track record or simply a polished sales pitch.
Testing Credibility:
When choosing a website designer, longevity is one of the easiest credibility checks. A web design company that has been around for 10, 20, or even 30 years has proven it can adapt as technology and customer needs change.
Years in business matter, but so does actual experience. Ask how many websites the company has designed and launched and pay attention to the quality of that work. A web design company with hundreds or thousands of completed projects has likely worked through a wide range of industries, challenges, and website goals
This is one of the most revealing questions to ask a web designer. Find out whether the people designing, writing, and developing your website are actually part of the company or if the work is being outsourced elsewhere.
Want to meet our in-house team? Schedule a Zoom meeting below!
Book an Intro MeetingChecking Quality
Any reputable web design company should be able to show you websites it has actually designed and launched. Look beyond whether you personally like the colors or style. Check whether the sites feel professional, are easy to navigate, work well on mobile, and clearly represent different businesses.
View our portfolio of 700+ websites here!
Ask whether your website will be designed around your business or built from the same template used for dozens of other clients. Templates are not automatically bad, but when hiring a web design agency, you should understand how much thought goes into your layout, messaging, navigation, and conversion strategy.
Technical Inquiries
When hiring a web design agency, ask plainly who owns the finished website, its content, and its files once the project is complete. Some companies retain ownership of the website or require you to keep paying them to continue using it. If you leave, you may discover that the website you spent years paying for cannot come with you.
Ask what your website will be built on and why the company uses that platform. Established platforms like WordPress give businesses flexibility and access to a large ecosystem of developers, while proprietary website builders can make it much harder to move your site elsewhere later.
You may never want to edit your website yourself, but you should still have the ability to access it. This is an important part of learning how to choose a web design company because your needs will continue changing long after the new site goes live.
A website still needs updates, maintenance, security, hosting, and occasional troubleshooting after launch. Ask whether the web design company provides ongoing support, what that support includes, and how easy it is to reach a real person when you need help. Choosing a website designer who will still answer the phone six months or six years later can make a huge difference in your long-term experience.
Clients love our in-house support team for this reason – available by phone, email or livechat during all business hours!
A website can look great and still fall short as a marketing tool. When choosing a website designer, you want someone who is thinking beyond launch day and considering how the website will support your business once real customers start using it. Ask how they use SEO to get your website seen or other digital marketing services they can provide!
Choosing a Web Designer You Won’t Regret
Knowing how to choose a web design company gets much easier when you know what to ask.
A good agency should be able to explain its process without hiding behind jargon, and you should come away from the conversation with a clear sense of what working together would actually be like.
At WebTek, we have been designing websites for local and regional businesses for more than 25 years. Our work is handled by an in-house team, and we build on WordPress so clients are not boxed into a platform they cannot leave. Once your website is complete, you own it.
If you are choosing a website designer now, ask the hard questions before you sign anything. We are happy to answer them, show you real examples of our work, and walk you through how we approach a project from the first conversation through launch.
Ready to see if WebTek is the right fit? Schedule a website consultation today.
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