Either way, having a relevant and awesome website that your customers will love is, without doubt, one of the most important weapons in your marketing arsenal!
Let’s assume that you’re already on board with the fact that a website is a must for any business.
But what next?
Well, you really have two options.
- Building the website yourself
- Hire a website designer to do it for you.
For most business owners though, option one is probably not going to be an option in reality at all. You possibly don’t have the skills, time or knowledge to do it yourself.
You may have even tried to do it yourself without much success.
Yes, we’re talking about those glossy TV adverts.
They promise you can build an amazing website in under 10 minutes on certain platforms that will propel your business to new heights.
Trust us, it’s not that easy!
You only need to look at reviews on Trustpilot for some of the top free or freemium website builders out there:
- Squarespace 59% voted as bad – “Excruciating unpleasant user experience”
- Wix 67% voted as bad – “Website for hobbies not for business”
- Weebly 41% voted as bad – “DO NOT build your site on Weebly, they have no support”
Don’t take our word for it, do your homework and make up your own mind.
Then you have option 2 open!
Hire a website designer to do it for you
Now the thing here isn’t to feel bad that you need to hire a website designer.
Yes, it will cost you more than doing it yourself, but it’s like any service that businesses hire.
They do it for skills, knowledge, speed, efficiency, and quality.
You wouldn’t arrange a corporate event for your business and do the catering yourself, would you?
Hiring a website designer is no different.
Finding the right web design company to build your website is critical to making sure it goes smoothly.
At this point, you should be asking yourself a few simple questions
- What do you need the website to do?
- What are your realistic goals for the website?
- What is your budget to build a new website?
- Where can you find the best designer to suit your needs?
- How do you know they can get it right?
These are just starting points and questions you need to answer before you even pick up the phone or send an email to a web agency.
Below we’ll cover them in a bit more detail.
What do you need your website to do?
It may sound like a simple question, but it’s really at the heart of everything.
Knowing the types of pages and the functionality of the website is important.
Usually, most websites fall into two categories.
Obviously, each website is unique, but these two types are the main avenues that most websites will take.
- Either a website that is really used to provide information (think of it as an online sales brochure)
- A website that has transactional capabilities such as an online eCommerce store or online shop.
There are other websites types. Plus various different degrees of functionality between these but the majority of sites will normally fall into one of them.
Knowing which type of website is a great start before you hire a website designer as it’s one of the first questions, they will ask you.
Brochure Websites
Brochure websites typically have pages that contain information and really rely on a customer contacting you for your products and services.
Taking design and how it looks to one side they would typically contain the following types of pages:
Homepage
About page
Service pages
Pricing pages
Portfolio or projects
Blog page
Contact us page
These types of websites are ideal if you’re a service-based business and need to use them to generate calls and emails.
A lot of startup businesses that need a website will probably start with one of these.
They are more cost-effective, usually easier to build and a great starting point.
E-commerce websites
These types of sites are used to sell products and services directly to customers.
They can come in many forms including purchasing products, booking appointments, reservations, paid downloads or ordering subscription-based services etc.
As with the above brochure sites, they can still have the same kind of pages but will also have some additional pages and functions, such as:
- Customer account creation
- Customer login area
- Category pages with filters
- Product pages
- Basket page
- Checkout page
- Payment gateway (allowing people to pay)
There is a lot more to it, but these are the basics.
Online shops will be more expensive when you hire a website designer to build your site as opposed to a brochure.
There is just more work involved in them.
Depending on your business, how it operates and the budget available will very much determine which is best for you.
As an example, let’s say you produce organic cotton t-shirts that are delivered directly to the customer and you’re a start-up business.
In an ideal world, you would probably want to go full steam ahead into building it as an online shop.
But you may not have the funds right now for a full eCommerce site.
As an alternative, you could start with a simple brochure site with pages talking about your business, your ethos and the type of clothes. With the aim of allowing someone to buy over the phone from you or through an online portal such as eBay or Etsy.
Six months later, you have the funds available and decide to upgrade your brochure site to e-commerce.
Now what?
Write down what your ideas are, how will it work, what do customers need to do.
Think about it and consider all elements, even ask your friends and colleagues what their thoughts are.
The more information you have and the more concise direction you can provide the better.
Remember a website is never set in stone and can be adapted and changed over time, although this comes with a word of warning!
Web companies will base their quote on your ideas and what you want and need from your website.
Deviating from this mid-project will increase costs and possibly take longer to produce which is one way that can cause friction between you and your developer!
The key point here is when you hire a website designer, have as much information as possible and try and stick to the plan.
What are your realistic goals from your website?
Again, this may sound like a simple question.
You want to either drive more enquiries or sell more online, that’s a given!
You need to be more targeted in what you REALISTICALLY want to achieve from the website in manageable time frames.
Why would this have an impact when hiring a website designer, I hear you ask?
Well, it boils down to two things, honesty and expectations.
The first is important, honesty.
Let’s use the example again of you being a new online seller of organic cotton t-shirts.
Your goal is to sell £100,000 in your first quarter and your organic t-shirts sell for £50 per item. That means you would have to sell 2,000 in three months.
Unless you have massively deep pockets filled with cash for marketing, have a team of experts on hand to advise you and a cast-iron plan, it’s possibly not going to be realistic, to begin with.
But what has this got to do with hiring a website designer, they design the website only, don’t they?
The answer is both yes and no.
A truly knowledgeable and honest web designer will have tonnes of experience with not only building websites but how things work online, how long things take, the competition out there and experience with working on other client projects.
If they respond to your goals with “that sounds great, we can help you easily achieve that”, it’s probably worth looking around for another designer.
The reason being is, they aren’t being that honest.
Do a search online for “organic cotton t-shirts” and there are 27.5 million results.
Your website SEO needs to help you achieve a high ranking to get organic traffic or your marketing needs to drum up the business or a combination of the two.
A new website on its own won’t do it alone.
It will take a lot of time and effort and won’t be that “easy to achieve” in your first three months online.
The second reason is expectation.
You have goals and your expectations are probably that the website will help you achieve them.
When your expectations are way above what is realistically achievable in the short term, that is where you and your web developer will start to have problems if every detail isn’t ironed out.
It doesn’t even have to be financial goals, it could be a certain function of the website, a time frame for getting it online or a design you want to achieve.
If your designer says ‘yes’ to something the benchmark has already been set and so has your expectations.
Do your research when you look to hire a website designer, check out their portfolios and read their feedback and reviews.
If what they produce has major errors or you think looks mediocre or worst case bad, no matter how cheap they are, they probably don’t have the skills or abilities to do the job you want.
What is your budget for the website or what does a website cost to build?
They’re honestly not dirty questions!
It really does help you get a designer that you can work with and a website that you’ll be proud of.
Having a budget in mind of what you can afford or what you’re willing to invest will make your life easier.
It’s like anything that you purchase really, property, cars, clothing or holidays for example. You wouldn’t expect to have a budget of £1000 for a family of four to travel to an all-inclusive five-star resort in the Maldives, web design is no different.
You’re really paying for the time and experience of a web designer.
Costs can vary greatly as every project is different but generally they will depend on a few things including:
- The type of website that you need
- The complexity of the functions of the website
- The number of pages that the website needs
- Whether content is supplied or not
- How the website is built or coded
- Which level of web designer do you work with
There is a lot more to it but these are the most common factors that will impact the price of a website.
Freelancers will charge less, small to midsized web agencies more and larger agencies the most, then you have specialist coders that can charge anything depending on the task.
But now, I hear you saying, that doesn’t help that much with how much does a website costs.
I’m going to stick my neck out here and try and give you some types of price bands.
Website build price bands
As we mentioned previously, each website is totally different in nature and depending on who builds it will impact the cost of it.
When you hire a website designer be aware that most will work to an hourly rate and a lot will have a minimum charge for each project.
Typically, the hourly rate will be around £20-£40 for freelancers, £60-£80 for a mid-sized agency and upwards of £100 per hour for larger agencies. We’ll leave specialist coders out for now due to the nature of what they do.
Although knowing rough hourly web design rates may not help you that much as you then have to ask yourself “long many hours will a website take to build”.
Again, this is a complex answer as it can depend on the talent of the website designer, whether they use templates, the platform they work in plus many other factors.
There is a simple answer here, there are too many aspects and differences between each website to give you a true figure.
But there are a few rules of thumb you can work to:
- Brochures sites typically cost less than eCommerce websites
- The more functions of a website the more it will cost
- The more elaborate the design the higher the price
- How many pages on the website will play a role
- The level of the web designer and their skill.
The best advice I can offer when looking to hire a website designer and trying to figure out a cost is to have a budget in your mind of what you can spend.
Speak to a few web designers and give them as much detail as possible.
Prepare as much information as you can and send them all the same documents. You need to compare like for like.
Ensure that when each quote comes back you check that it meets your initial ideas and needs.
If the web design quotes all come back much higher than your original budget then chances are, what you want possibly can’t be done for the price.
If there are massive differences in the quotes, ask yourself whether all the companies fully understand what you’re trying to achieve, and the tasks involved.
Should you get quotes back that are exceptionally low and you’re shocked, don’t just opt for the lowest one.
The saying “it sounds too good to be true” should be considered.
A word of caution
Web companies that charge a flat fee regardless of the website should be looked at with caution.
Knowing everything you have now read above, how can a company charge a flat fee of £495 for an eCommerce store for example?
Chances are it’s template-driven with minimal thought or features that go towards building the website.
The final thought on this is if you don’t give the website designer every detail about what you want, chances are they will quote and charge based on their own ideas or assumptions.
Halfway through the project, you will have a nasty surprise that the quote jumps massively.
Where to find the best designer?
Now there are many ways that you can do this.
Find websites that you like the look of
Look online and find websites that you really like, look at the bottom of the website and usually, it will say “designed by [company name]”.
If it doesn’t pick up the phone and call the company that owns the website and see if you can find out who did it or if you can speak to the person in charge of the website.
If you can have a word with them and try and do some digging.
Speak to your contacts
A great way to hire a website designer is to actually speak to your contacts, both business and personal.
They may have experience of dealing with a company and may be able to offer some recommendations.
This is the best way of finding a quality and affordable web designer.
Nothing beats getting information first-hand from someone who has worked with a web company.
You will be able to find out really what they are like as a company and how they will likely work with you.
Do searches online
Do a search online and find businesses that you like the look of.
Check out the web designer’s website. If it looks ropey it’s not a good sign, if they can’t get their own site right what is the chances that yours will end up amazing.
Before you ask for a web design quote
If you have selected a few companies, even before you pick up the phone or send an email to the company, do your research.
- Check out their portfolios
- Look online for their reviews
- Establish how long they have been in business
- Check their social media feeds such as Facebook or Twitter
- If they have a blog section on their website have a browse through it. See the types of things that they talk about.
Regardless of how you come to find a select number of companies to approach, check them out first.
Once you have shortlisted a few, I would say you need at least four companies, the best approach is to give them a call. Speaking to someone is invaluable, better than email.
Don’t be afraid, we don’t bite.
By having an open conversation, you can really judge whether you will be able to work comfortably with a company or not.
By email, it’s much more challenging to really get an impression of someone.
A few things to look out for or check:
- Do they sound too pushy in a sales way?
- If they can give you a quote over the phone without talking in detail be wary
- Make sure they ask you relevant questions and seem interested in what you’re looking to do
- Ask and see if they have ever produced a site like what you want
- Ask if they have any advice or feedback on your project
- See how soon they can start the work, most good web designers will have a waiting list, occasionally they may have a hole in their diaries, however
- Ask if they can supply any clients they have worked for you to call and ask about them
- Ask how payment works, if it’s all upfront again be wary. When you hire a website designer most will ask for a deposit and then schedule payments throughout the project
- If the web designer seems non-interested and keeps trying to get you to email them before speaking be cautious. It’s our job as a web company to use this opportunity also to find out more about you and whether we can work well together.
- Be cautious of any guarantees about getting the website to rank number one or similar outlandish claim
- Ask if they offer support post website launch or any additional services such as SEO, Marketing, PPC or free advice
It’s at this point and if you’re happy, send the web designer all the information that you have for them to put your quote together!
How do you know they will get it right?
By this point and now that you have done your research, spoken to a few website designers, have had their quotes back, it’s now time to make a decision on who to choose.
You’ve done all you can to find the right company to work with.
You should feel confident that you have hired the right web company.
It’s now time to start working with them and enjoy the process.
There may be hiccups along the road, the project may change slightly as the website develops and there maybe sometimes that you feel it’s hard going.
However, I’m sure that you will end up with a website that you are really proud of and one that your customers will love, but most importantly one that helps drive your business forwards.
What do you think?
If you’ve ever had to hire a website designer, what was your experience like? Do you have any comments or feedback on how it went or suggestions to businesses looking to get a new website built?
We’d love for you to share your comments below.
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