Questions to ask your website designer

India’s rapid growing e-commerce industry is creating a huge demand for website services ever. Also, India is far too competitive to take chances with a web designer! Right? We understand, that when the question of hiring a web designer comes, there are a lot of questions that may come into your mind like how good are you at customizing templates? or the most important, when the website is finished, will it show on the top of Google the next day? Now, before you ask questions to your web designer first figure out what set of skills YOU want by prioritizing.
Well, here’s a list of some important questions you must ask your web designer.

1. What will be your process of designing?

Although, this is going to vary from person to person, start with a very important question whether the website is going to be open source based or custom coded from scratch.
While open source-based websites are generic, custom coded websites are specific and unique.     Both have different pros and cons depending upon your requirements.
For example, while open source based creates base within a few minutes, it is vulnerable to hackers.
On the other hand, custom coded website are the traditional ones and can be styled to look the way you want.

2. Show me your portfolio of work:

This will depend on what kind of website is in your mind. For instance, it may be a Community Building Website or Mobile Device Website or Informational Website or even Online Business Brochure. So, you need to review actual work before you jump to a decision, the “I know it when I see it” is going to work here!
On the other hand, if you are considering hiring a fresher, ask him to have some work done for you.

3. Are the designs used by you compatible for multi-browser and cross-platforms?

Your designer should create websites in such a way that the content and layout look relatively same or at least user friendly. Make sure that the designer tests to assure consistency. Also ask, Is it responsive for all screen sizes and different browsers?

4. Are you going to supply the original graphics files?

Acquisition of original graphics files is going to give you control of your website. Also, having a copy of your final website is good idea always. Open source website is going to be combination of web files and a database which will need backup.

5. Will you apply SEO to website?

SEO is all about optimizing a web page on the web search engines, and this all depends on how you understand the industry, customer trends and behavior. Not all designers are good at SEO and some might assume you will apply SEO yourself or give you editing control. Our company, being website designing company in Gurgaon, excel at SEO services because we know good SEO experience can really payoff for a business.

6. Do you have sales or marketing experience?

This question is important because some people are “programming people” and have little knowledge of the fact that marketing may really work for you if you use your ‘keywords’ card right. Make sure that your designer has some marketing/selling knowledge as it may hinder your business growth.

7. Do you offer other complimentary skills?

These may include marketing, graphic designing, E-commerce development, Social media optimization, promotions, cloud hosting, payment gateway services and so on depending upon your needs. If you could find these services in one company it saves a lot of time and money. We know this because we, as a website designing company in Gurgaon provide all this under one roof!

8. If I want to, can I edit some contents of website myself? Is the designer going to provide training to edit the content? If yes how difficult is the editing going to be and which parts will you be able to edit?

Otherwise you will have to depend on the designer for every minute editing.

9. Do I get to talk to my designer directly or the project manager?

You are in luck if you get to directly talk to designer instead of project manager for obvious reasons. On the other hand, if they include project manager it may get a little time consuming.

10. Do you outsource any work?

This may be relevant to some and irrelevant to others depending upon the work. If a company outsource any work, the coordination becomes very important to get things done effectively.

11. Do you offer training for maintenance?

When your website is finished and ready to go live it needs some maintenance or bug fixes. Normally you can learn the basics of CMS system in few hours, but you must ask for custom training. Or if you want, you can include maintenance in your package.

12.What do I need to supply to get things started?

Clarification of what you need to provide like contents, images, or other items and what web designer will handle will enable responsibilities on both ends and in turn enable accountability.
So, do make notes of the responsibilities shared.

13.What Security do you provide?

Security is your responsibility as much as it is of the developer. Creating backup is required but if you have open source-based site like WordPress, which is vulnerable to risk, a backup version is very important as hackers tend to delete backup if they find any.

14.How do you charge?

We said how because some designers charge project wise and some on hourly basis.Also, we didn’t add this question in the beginning because even you know at the end its all about Return on Investment. So, it doesn’t matter how much you are willing to invest (though there are some designers who overcharge unnecessarily) but how much return you are going to get.

If you are confident in your product you will indeed get returns otherwise you should be prepared for extensive marketing.Although some questions are not added here like how many computer languages do you know? And related because, this again depends on person to person. We believe these questions can get you through with it.