Choosing a Web Designer

Who do you trust? Who is the expert? How do you know if a web designer is worth his weight in salt?

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a web designer.  My policy is to give away information and sell a service.  Early in the process with clients, I go through a “discovery” phase – finding out where they stand with their site, then I take them through a teaching phase-  so that the decisions that follow are informed.  This is when I often find that the clients have had a bad run with their last “webmaster” (I use that term lightly).  Hindsight is 20/20 and this is a particularly hard lesson when a bad website is publicly displaying your decisions… for better or worse.

Here are a few questions you might ask to ensure your decision to hire a company or individual is a good one:

1. Do you build websites for a living, or on the side? How long have you been doing this?
2. Can I see six of your most recent websites?
3. Do you have references from clients past and present? May I contact them?
4. Can I get a copy of your hosting contract and your pricing list?
5. What platform or software do you you use to build your sites?
6. Will I get a blog?
7. Can I have multiple user accounts with different security roles?
8. Do you utilize all the recent web standards (HTML,CSS, XML, Accessibility, etc?)
9. Can I leave anytime and take my content with me?
10. How often do you back up all my data? Do I get a copy?
11. How often do you update your server software?
12. Do you charge per page or have limits on storage and bandwidth?
13. Do you support calendars? Photo Galleries? Web forms? Video? Audio?
14. What type of support do you offer? Phone? Email? On site? Do you have a SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

Can you think of other questions you would like to know?