Evaluate Experience

Has web design company created web sites similar to yours? Do they have relevant industry experience? As with any services company, choosing someone that has relevant experience. If you want to sell products through your web site and accept credit card payments, does web design company you are considering have experience doing just that?

Review Portfolio

A well established web design company will have a solid portfolio of web sites that they have created for other clients. Ask for links to other site design company has created and review each one. Do you like what you see? Do sites have a style that appeals to you? In addition to reviewing web sites, ask for customer references. Contact their clients and ask them about their experience with web design company. Were they happy with results? Did they get what they paid for? How much did they pay? Would they recommend them? How long did it take? What didn't they like about company? How responsive was company when they had questions?

Compare Prices

Pricing for creating a web site can vary. Typically, web design companies will charge one of three ways:

- Time and materials: price is variable based on actual number of hours spent working on your site. For example, a web design company may charge you $75 per hour. If it takes 100 hours to create your web site, your price would end up being $7,500. - Fixed Price: some design companies will charge you a fixed fee based on a fixed set of requirements. If you outline your requirements very carefully, many web design companies will quote you a single price. - Component Pricing: some design companies will charge "by page". By creating a price based on number of pages, you can control cost by designing a specific number of pages. Buyer beware: some design companies will charge by page but will have "special pricing" for components such as custom graphics, animated images, and like.

The most important step in pricing is to make sure potential design company outline all of prices associated with work and puts it all in writing. Never enter into a deal unless all of costs are well understood up front. Also make sure that you understand what "done" means. Try and structure payments such that a significant portion of fees (20%) are not due until you "accept" final web site. Include agreed-upon dates in your contract and provisions for what will happen if these dates are not met.

Solicit bids from multiple web design companies and compare both pricing models and prices themselves.

There are thousands of web designers across country and they should all fight feverously for your business! Be picky! If a web design company dismisses any of your questions regarding their design process, pricing, or client references, take your business elsewhere!

If your web browser crashes, do what I do. Just restart it. Don’t say you did something wrong. Don’t think that you must be so bad with computers that you crashed Internet. Just restart your browser, and if you have to restart your computer to do so, then do it as well. Most likely crash is not your fault.

2. The Internet Can Be Slow

No matter how fast your on-ramp to Internet may be, there will be times where it seems to take forever to load a web page. This is just nature of beast.

As Internet is a loosely connected network, if certain connections go down, computers may not always be able to route information via other networks. Thus access speed will suffer and your web browser will start to crawl. If this seems to be happening often, step away from computer, go outside and take a nice, long walk (unless it’s 30 degrees below). You can run your search another time when speed is back to normal.

And #1 thing you must realize when searching…

1. The Best Result Just May Be On Page 10

Most people only look through first page of search engine or directory results, usually top ten listings. Others may visit second page, but relatively very few people venture to higher numbered pages.

This is a shame – sometimes best results to a search engine query are not in first ten listings as they may only contain links to commercially driven sites or sites run by web owners who know how to manipulate listings. In some cases web sites containing perfectly good information may not be listed in top 10, 20, 50, or even top 100 results.

Obviously searching through many pages and pages of resulting sites will take extra time, especially if you do not have a high-speed connection to Internet. But, this time spent may well be worth it if you find some gems in rough! So if you have time, speed, and patience, browse through deeper results pages. You never know what you may find!

And that’s it – my top five list of things you must realize when searching. This covers slow access time, results not on page 1, browser bugs, web sites popping up and down and changing management, and need for sites to make money, causing advertisements to become more obtrusive. Gosh, that just makes you want to go out and search right now, doesn’t it? .