So you’ve decided to create a website for your business after all. This is a good first step—after all, having your own website opens up opportunities for digital marketing efforts that you can use to reach more potential customers. However, with over two billion websites on the internet today, it's no longer just enough to have a few pages and hope for the best!
To stay competitive, you will need to ensure that your website is well-designed and ranks high on Google search results. However, the only real way to know that it’s successful is to launch your website and see how it fares in the digital world. If your website is still under construction, then the performance of your website banks on your web designer’s skill.
That said, having an underperforming designer can really hurt your ventures in the online world. To help you avoid spending on a bad investment, here are four telltale signs of a bad web designer that you need to watch out for:
You were offered a cheap service, way below competing rates
There’s a reason why web designers can charge hefty prices: they are backed by years of training, experience, and technology.
Your website is your portal to the world, and if done right, it can help you earn a living. Thus, it stands to reason that you should not expect to spend a small price on something with the potential to earn you millions!
No scope of work was presented
The scope of work details all the work to be performed and delivered by whom and when. It also specifies the limitations of the job’s scope.
In creating your website, some website design services may also offer maintenance work for a certain period of time after your website’s launch to iron out the kinks. Other providers may also include graphic design and search engine optimization services along with the package to really give you your money’s worth!
What’s alarming is that some other “providers” will not have a scope at all! Having a scope of work signals that a website designer is diligent in his or her work and sets expectations from the beginning. This way, you are clear which parts of the work your chosen design agency will handle and which parts you need to supply yourself or outsource to others.
They didn’t discuss SEO strategy
A good portion of what SEO companies do is related to optimizing website design and code. For it to do well in Google search results, your website has to have code optimizations, such as meta descriptions, dynamic URLs, and title tags. Having website usability features, such as sitemaps, formatting, and mobile responsiveness, also helps in rankings too.
A web designer with no regard for SEO strategy is not much of a web designer at all. At its core, SEO is all about creating a rich user experience—which ultimately helps you rank better in Google search results.
They’re not using a CMS
Pre-built content management systems, such as Wix, are essentially front-end user interfaces. These allow users who may not necessarily have a background in web development to add, delete, and modify content without the help of a web administrator.
Using these pre-built solutions is cheaper than building one from the ground up, and saves time by letting a website owner focus on the parts that customers can actually see. Unless your website has very specific needs that cannot be supplied by any CMS available out there, then there’s no reason for a web designer to not use one!
Conclusion
Good web design is an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. Given that your website is the first thing customers will see when looking you up online, you will want to make a good impression. When it comes to digital marketing, website design is not one of the things that you can cheap out on— you always get what you pay for!
Phantom Eye Design is a web design agency in Athens, GA. We specialize in boosting your website’s appeal through well-implemented search engine optimization, digital marketing strategies, and graphic design theories and practices. Contact us today to learn more about our services.
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