Paradoxically, it’s the easiest and the hardest thing – finding the best website design company can be an exciting, frustrating, challenging and creative experience all rolled into one.
For starters, statistics reported in 2018 reveal that there were 23 million web developers in the US alone. There are an estimated 543 million active websites on the global web and nearly 4.5 billion unique internet users. The number of Google searches per day amounted to 5.6 billion per day.
Mind-boggling as they are, these statistics alone don’t give you the whole picture. When it comes down to your own website, where do you stand? Here are more numbers coming your way:
- Users need just 50 milliseconds to decide if they want to stay or leave
- More than 50% of users say they wouldn’t recommend a business with a website that’s badly designed for mobile
- 40% of online transactions are made on mobile phones
- Bad layout and poor content turn off 38% of website visitors
- And finally, nearly 90% of consumers who shop online are less likely to revisit a website after a poor experience.
All these numbers point in just one clear direction: your website needs to do its job. It’s no longer mere window dressing or a trendy must-have. It is your marketing department.
What Is An Effective Website?
To avoid your website getting lost in the crowd of millions of websites out there on the World Wide Web, it must have certain essential qualities. What differentiates it from those of your competitors? A credible, professional-looking, attractive website reflects your own business values and brand. It must engage the viewer’s attention, generate interest and curiosity, evoke emotions, and provide access to what the viewer was looking for in the first place. Finally, it must be recognizable and highly memorable.
Some of the features that viewers and visitors love are:
- Organized and logical structure
- Unfussy navigation
- Unique, reliable and engaging content
- Memorable design
- Good upload speed
- Easy to read font
Features that search engines love are:
- Validated, neat, clean coding
- Efficient SEO
- Search engines work by crawling, indexing and ranking: ensure that your site is optimized for all three
- Helpful Sitemaps
- Great content
When you keep these concepts uppermost while looking for the best design or website redesign, work to a plan, with clear directions and strategy.
It’s essential to think like a visitor or a customer: what do they want, what do they see, what attracts them and what keeps them engaged? Most importantly, what makes them return and convert clicks into revenue?
The immediate look and feel, colors, fonts, typography, graphics, ease of navigation, overall presentation ideas, useful information, and content are all important elements that are gleaned in the first 0.05 seconds when the decision is made whether to stay or to go.
7 Tips to Find The Best Web Designing Company
With so many web designers and design companies operating today, it’s difficult to find the right one that fits your needs, preferences and budget. Additionally, there are a host of unethical, fly-by-night, unscrupulous operators who promise heaven and earth and then simply take your money and disappear.
Plan the search and search according to a plan – this works best.
1. Look at websites you admire: Start with a concept or idea that you would like to express through your website. You can look at similar businesses, those in the same sector or of the same size, local websites, even your competitors’ sites. This helps to cherry-pick the ideas you love and discard what you hate.
2. Get recommendations and referrals: Spread the word around that you’re on the hunt for a web design company. No doubt, you’ll be flooded with calls from a co-worker’s niece or a cousin’s son, but when you sift through you could land a winner.
3. Pick passion: Whether they’re young and raring to go or experienced and on top of the game, passion is what separates the wheat from the chaff. This means they’re ready to embrace out-of-the-box ideas, in sync with current trends, but they also work hard and won’t rest till the customer is 100% satisfied. Ideally, they should have experience in multiple fields such as development, design and marketing. This helps them get the big picture. It also helps if they’ve worked with different industries.
4. Latest concepts: Pick a design company that is familiar with the latest concepts and trends. This means they’re comfortable with responsive and intuitive design, a strong CMS system, and have a tried and tested, knowledgeable social media element in the design. They should have the latest design trends at their fingertips so that your website benefits from great new concepts such as parallax scrolling, new color palettes, flat/material design, etc.
5. Experience and Portfolio: Partner with a design company that has enough experience in designing customized, complex websites. For starters, they should have been around for some time before you got to know them. It’s a big risk to try out an agency that’s just opened its doors, no matter how exciting and impressive their sales pitch. They must have proven SEO experience and a successful track-record in boosting search engine traffic. Take a look at their portfolio of working and live websites, not just screenshots. Look at their own website to check that they’re not outsourcing work to other agencies.
6. Communication: A design team, no matter how brilliant, needs to keep channels of communication open with the client. They need to listen to your ideas, explain theirs, find the via media and get the project going without endless back and forth. Trust your instincts when you meet with a new web design company – will they keep you updated on progress? Are they clear about payment schedules and delivery deadlines? What is their policy for getting great, unique and reliable content? What is the kind of after-sales support they offer?
7. Social Media Presence: Ensure that the web design firm you pick has a strong and positive social media presence. Today, this is a must-have for a successful reputation and brand.
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.
