If you are planning to have your own website or re-design your website and sub contracting it to a web designer, web developer or a web development company, it is important to get some knowledge first before engaging them, this will allow you to make wise decision that will save you money and time. Feel free to jump around different topics below.

Selection Criteria

Selecting the right website provider is crucial to the success of your company’s online presence. First thing you need to know is that Web Designer and Web Developer are two different professions and they have different responsibilities. If you just want someone to provide you a design for your website, then hire website designers, they will help you conceptualize your website design and provide you a mockup, or a sample design in a form of a picture file, for your approval. They are like interior designers, providing sketches and ideas. While website developers, they are the one developing the website based on the design, they are like contractors or builders of house that based their work from the design and blueprint provided by the designer. Both of them are heavily involved in the process of website creation. One of your criteria of choosing a website provider should be their expertise, the skills and knowledge in developing quality websites. Below are minimum required skill sets.

Web Designer – Minimum Required Skill Sets

• Detailed, the web designer should be meticulous with layout, spacing & font styles.
• Creative, the web designer must love arts and colors, and must be keen in choosing suitable graphics/ photos.
• Trendy, the web designer must be updated with the latest design trends.
• Team Player, the web designer must be able to work with developers.
• Tech Savvy, the web designer must be proficient at least in Adobe Photoshop.
• Effective Marketer, a web designer must also know effective ways of marketing. There are certain design layouts that are proven effective to generate leads.

Web Developer – Minimum Required Skill Sets

• Logical, the web developer must love to analyze.
• Organize, the web developer should be particular with coding standards.
• Very Technical, the web developer must be proficient in some programming languages like HTML, PHP, and JavaScript.
• CMS Focus, your website must be built with Content Management System in mind, it is a software to update your site easily. Because eventually you’ll be the one updating the website. Some well known CMS is wordpress, drupal, joomla. The developer can also built their own CMS using various framework like laravel, code igniter and the likes.
• CSS Expert, the web developer should have extensive knowledge of CSS, a stylesheet language for defining the layout and styles of a website.
• Passionate Learner, the web developer must keep him/ herself updated with latest technology.

These are just the basic requirements, some projects like Web application development or eCommerce development need a higher skill sets as compare with what we have mentioned. If it is your first time working with them, you may test them by asking them to rate their proficiency in some of the tools or programming languages that are mentioned above and always ask for their portfolio.

Web Design & Development Firm – Selection Criteria

You may also opt to get your website developed by a web development company or web design agency as compare with freelancers. Sometimes their services refer to web design and web development as one, since in a company they should have team members who knows both web design and development. So how do you choose your website provider, aside from considering your budget, which is tackled in Web Development Pricing section. Here are the selection criteria:

• Testimonials: The reviews from clients are very powerful, you will be able to get some insights whether the company handles the project professionally or not. Lookout for authentic testimonials that can be found in facebook review, google business listing review, and video testimonials.
• Portfolio: The best example of their work is their own website, check if it is modern and professional looking. Next checkout the web provider portfolio page, and see if the design fits your style. Note to observe only the latest portfolio, normally you will see the year the website is created in the footer or bottom section of the website.
• Clientele: The clients’ logos serves as track record of the web development firm, it is better to work with companies whom have extensive experience in their field.
• Meetup: There is a saying that do not judge the book by its cover, meet the representative of the website development company and see how they present their service.

Web Development Process

For website provider to achieve in developing a quality, effective, suitable website for you or your company, it must go thru this standard web development process. If you skip some stages, you may not be able to get the results you wanted. Demand from your website provider to go through each steps.

1. Data requirements gathering – 1 to 2 days

It’s important to know what is your objective for having a website. Is it for generating leads, sharing information, displaying your product catalog, online selling or all of the above? You must also know who is your target audience, their age and gender. Note that you do not need to engage with a website provider yet, if you do not know the answers to these basic questions. Your inputs will determine the output of the web designer. Other information that you can share during this stage are company’s vision, mission, culture, values, history, competitors, anything about your business. And also during this stage the web designer will request a hi-resolution of your company’s logo, he/ she will ask for your preferred color scheme, sample website pegs to serve as inspiration, your navigation structure (ie. Home, About, Products, Contact…) and sample contents if any. You may answer our web design data gathering form and let our team assist you further. The output of the website provider at this phase is the timeline of the deliverable.

2. Design collaboration – 3 to 4 days

In our company High6, we start with wireframing/ sketching giving you some ideas on what the website layout will look like. Imagine us as a couturier who draws his/ her idea of the dress’ design for client’s approval. After incorporating the feedback, the next step is to create a mockup of your website. In a mockup you will see the actual web design together with photos, graphics, font styles in a picture format. This will give you a very clear idea of what your website will look like. I encourage you to give as many comments as possible during this stage. It is for the benefit of both sides, you will get the design you like at the same time the website provider will not need to redo their work during the development stage. We are using a free tool http://redpen.io/ for collaboration, you may suggest it to your website designer.

3. Website Development stage – 12 to 15 days

Now is the time to focus on working on your content (it will speed up the website development if you have worked on your content prior to engaging the website development agency). At this same time the website developer creates each pages of your website. Once the web developer completed a web page, he/ she should give you a temporary link to view the website, so that you can provide your comments. If the web development firm offers data encoding like in our company High6, you have to regularly supply the website content, so that you do not have to update your website on your own.

4. Testing stage – 1 to 2 days

At this stage, the web developer must have done testing on your website. But it’s important for you to test it yourself.  First you have to visit all web pages, check all the links, navigation, anchors, if it is working properly. Click on your facebook, instagram and all other social media icons and see if it is the right link. View your website in different devices (ie. desktop, mobile phone and tablet) and different browsers (ie. edge, google chrome, safari). Shoot an inquiry in your contact us page, and see if you receive an email.

5. Launching Stage – 1 day

Congratulations, your website is almost complete, but the web developers must make some configuration to link your domain name, web hosting to your new website. After the launching, make a quick test then announce it to all your prospects and clients that you have a new website.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Stage

This is not the last stage, actually this should be at the early stage of the website design and development. I did not put this at the beginning because not all web development providers are knowledgeable in how Search Engine Works. But if they do, this is the part when they analyze your competitors, the common search queries of your target customers, and come up with keywords, meta title and description in each pages of your website that will tell the search engine (ie. Google or Bing) what your website is all about. It is also important to put in Tags/ Pixels in the website for monitoring of visitors behavior, this is explained in How To Be Seen Online section.

Website Must Haves

Inform your web designer, developer or website design company that these are must haves in your website. If these are not incorporated, you are not getting the most value from your investment.

1. Must be mobile responsive

More and more people are using their mobile phones to surf the internet, probably because we carry our phones anywhere we go, and with cheap data plan it becomes very convenient to find information online. That is why it is a must that your website can adjust neatly in smaller screens and still be easy to navigate around.

2. Must convey your message clearly

The most important message of your website should be telling your visitors what products, services, or information you are offering, and it should be crystal clear to your visitor upon loading of site within 5 seconds time frame. Beyond that, if they still do not have a clue that means your website is not effective, the photos, titles and description used are vague. The web designer and SEO consultant can help you plan the right layout, pictures and message.

3. Must load fast

Have you encountered website that loads like forever? What do you do with those type of sites? Close it perhaps right? You definitely want your website to load fast. There are 3 ways: The pictures should be compressed, you may use this tool http://compressjpeg.com. The software must be optimized, which is the job of the web developer. The server specifications must be above average, this will depend on your budget.

4. Must be free from dummy content

This is common sense, but there are a lot of websites that still have dummy text, dummy pages, even dummy links. Visitors may think that you are not reliable, not professional and not credible. This can be easily solved by doing thorough testing on your website, checking all pages and links. The website provider must also do their initial run-through on your website to prevent this type of problems.

5. Must have traffic insights

A website is an extension of your brand. In a physical store if there are no visitors or no customers that means there is something wrong. Same goes with a website, if there are few people visiting, it is a signal to do something with it. Traffic monitoring, is a way for you to know how many people visited your site, how long were they browsing your pages, and sometimes you can also get the demographics of the visitors. By right all website owners must be able to see their site traffic, if not, demand your website developer to install it for you.

How To Be Seen Online?

I assume that one of your reasons of getting a website or having a website re-designed is because first you want to be credible and second you want to be seen online, get more leads/ inquiries in your website, thus increase sales. There are 3 main ways to be seen online:

1. Optimize your website to be visible in search engines

a. Content: You might have heard that content is king in the internet, it actually depends, google and other search engines love websites that give value to their searchers, if you have content that is hard to read or that is not relevant then even if you have lots of content in the internet, it may not help you rank high. It is also important to be strategic in creating your content that is why before developing your website, I advise that you should have a clear idea on the initial and future content to be placed in your website. The content must contain keywords that your target customers will most likely put as query when searching the web.

b. On Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Once you have rich content, the next step is to work on optimizing the content using some coding to create proper header tags, title, meta description and keywords that will allow browsers (ie Google, Edge, etc.) to better understand and display your content. This is normally done by a web developer together with the SEO consultant.

c. Analytics: When your website is live and running, you would want to know the number of visitors in your website, what web page they are visiting, what country or city  they are from, what device do they used in browsing your website, how long do they browse your website. With this statistics, it will allow you to adjust your website to better suit your visitors.

d. Tags/Pixels: Do you know that you can put a mark to people who visits your website so that you can re-market your products and services to them.  It is called re-marketing tags in google and pixels in facebook. This is by far the most important element in digital marketing. Imagine the possibility of having a specific campaign, targeting all visitors who’ve visited a particular page in your website. For instance you are selling a red shoe and a green shoe, if a visitor visited your page about red shoe but he/ she did not purchase yet, you would want to target them again via digital advertisements (Google Ads or Facebook Ads) informing them that there is a discount for the red shoe, and the chances for your visitor to buy the red shoe is higher. You would not want to sell them the green shoe, right? You can ask your web developer to place the tags in your website.

2. Digital Marketing

a. Paid: If you have just launched your website, it is nearly impossible to rank in the first page of any search engines. The solution is paid advertisement. It may seems simple to just pay the search engine and be on top of the results page, but unfortunately it is not that easy especially if you have a lot of competitors doing the same, paying for advertisements. It is a skill that you must learn or you can hire an SEO consultant to handle your advertisements.

b. Press release and Outreach: If you don’t have much budget for paid advertisement and you have a lot of time to spare, then doing outreach might be for you. Meaning of outreach is reaching out to influencers or to administrators of famous authority website and asking them if they can publish your content in their website, your content must contain backlinks (do follow links) to your website. When you amass backlinks to your website, it will slowly increase your credibility and ranking in google and other search engines. It tells google that your website is credible, since there are several authority sites linking to you.

3. Traditional

You can still apply traditional way of promotion in marketing your website, some of which are posters, brochures, business cards, etc. Always remember to display the links of your website or you may also put a QR code in your marketing collateral, that when scanned using mobile device it will got to the website link that you have specified. The objective here is to let them visit your website.

Having these knowledge about the criteria of choosing web designer, developer & website development firm, the process of website creation, the must haves in your website and the different ways to market your website. You will surely be able to equip yourself and make a wise decision on choosing the right website provider.

If you need any further guidance in your website development, feel free to contact High6, web design & development agency.