In 2016, What are the Most Important Questions to Ask Website Designers, Before You Hire Them

Choosing who it is that will design and build your website is a pretty big decision. Pick the wrong website designers and you could wind up with a costly and largely ineffective web presence, but select the right team and your business will be armed with the most important marketing tool, today.

In 2016, these are the questions you should be asking any company that you're thinking about hiring for web design services.

1. Will my website be built in Canada, by your team, or will it be outsourced overseas? Believe it or not, many 'Canadian' web design companies outsource their work, making it much more difficult to follow up if you have issues or need to make changes to your site in the future.
2. Do you have an actual web developer on staff? Sometimes, companies that sell web design services really only employ graphic designers or a couple of basement bound nerds, nobody with real web development training and/or experience.
3. How many programming languages do you specialize in? In this case, the more the merrier!
4. Will I own my website or will I simply be renting it from you? If I decide to leave your firm, will I be able to take my website and all of its components and transfer to a new firm? It really is shady business when web design companies make people believe they're buying a website, but are really only renting it to them. If we've heard it once, we've heard it many times, business owners decide to take their web business elsewhere, only to discover that they never actually owned their websites!
5. Will the website be built on software that's open source? Ensure your website isn't held hostage by proprietary developed software!
6. Do I own my domain name? This is often overlooked and vitally important. Far too many established businesses have lost their online identity when they discover that they don't actually own their domain names.
7. Where will my website be hosted? Find out where it is that your site will live - in the slums, or some place safe and secure?
8. How will you ensure a positive user experience? Sites that are obnoxious or don't look trustworthy have very high bounce rates, and high bounce rates are bad for business.
9. Can you guarantee a fast loading speed? You know those websites where you could quite literally enter the URL and go wash your car in the amount of time it takes for the home page to load? That is precisely what you don't want your website to do! Google and site visitors like web pages that load quickly.
10. Will the website be responsive? This is an absolute must, today, when the vast majority of the population searches the web from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. You need a website that is compatible with all of these devices.

Ensure the web design services you pay for will be a sound investment for your business! If you're looking to streamline your search for website designers who can provide you with a custom web solution, perfectly tailored to your business' needs and ready to perform in today's technological world, give us a call!