Website Design

Regardless of the type of business you run, your website is your online storefront. When prospects land on your home page, they'll decide in 10 seconds or less if your website is worth their time. Your goal is to get people to find your website, and once they arrive, to actually do something.

When it comes to redesigning or updating your website, you want to partner with the right website company in order to create a stellar user experience.

Before you compare different website companies, it's critical to know what your goals are for your site. Your needs may range from offering basic information about products and services and a "contact us" page, to a comprehensive e-commerce website to handle online transactions, or something in between.

When contacting a company, be crystal clear on your target market and their needs; your website needs to meet their needs and desires. You can prepare a basic outline of the webpages you want and what each page should accomplish for your prospects and customers. This will help the website company to have an understanding of the type of site you want to develop.

Website company services

Website companies do more than just throw some graphics and HTML together on the Internet. They provide or contract with experts to take care of all aspects of a web design project. These web professionals include:

• Web designers who work with page layouts, graphics, logos, navigation links, social media buttons, and color schemes.
• Web developers who create the code, understand and leverage the content management system, and ensure the back end of the site works properly.
• Hosting providers to get your site up and running on the web.
• Content creators who write compelling content (including titles and descriptions) for the user experience and optimize it for search engines in order to attract traffic to your website.

The number of services a website company provides and the complexity of features will depend on how you want your site to function. As you prepare to meet with different companies, determine which services are the most important and make sure each company can deliver.

Types of website companies

If you want to develop a website using a single point of contact, all-in-one website companies manage the project from start to finish. They either work with a team of web professionals, or outsource different responsibilities depending on the type of project. All-in-one companies charge the most, but provide streamlined communication and dole out clear responsibilities so you know the job will get done properly.

Instead of full-service website companies, you could hire dedicated freelancers to handle different elements of a website project. This gives you more control over the project as you can pick and choose the best freelancers for each part of the job. However, it can be time-consuming to find each expert and difficult to coordinate different professionals to complete the project in a timely manner.

Of course, you may already have in-house staff that has experience with web design or programming. If they can dedicate time without their regular responsibilities suffering, this can save considerable money. And you can still hire a website company to work alongside your staff to provide skills that you might not have in-house.

Remember that nobody knows your business or your target market better than you. Even if you hire the best website company around, you still need to create quality content and update your website regularly. Many businesses are migrating to WordPress for its open-source content management system. It's easy to learn and puts the business owner, rather than a web master, in the driver's seat.