www.thewebtailor.co.uk
Where is your website?
The first thing to check, of course, is that the designer has a usable and clear site themselves.
Have a good look round the site, and consider things like load times, navigation and clarity. If you find their site confusing and disorganised, what are they going to do to your site? On the other hand, if their site is clear and functional, that's a good indication that yours will be too.
Examine the source code for some of the pages. Is it clearly structured? If you're going to be taking over the maintenance of your site, you want to be taking over from someone who leaves things neat.
You can also learn a lot about the philosophy of design employed by the designer - are pages designed to look impressive, to deliver information, or to acheive a balance of both? How closely do the design philosophies of the designer mirror the objectives of your organisation, and your website?
What's your view on style sheets?
The rationale behind cascading style sheets is that information is separate from design. The intention is that web pages should hold content, and that style sheets should determine presentation.
Already significant, in the future this will be essential. With the wide variety of media being used to access the internet, from mobile phones to 28inch colour TVs, from computer monitors to audio-reading devices, it is clear that presentation cannot be fixed. What, after all, does an italic font sound like?
The answer is style sheets. Page content is marked up for its meaning - as a heading, as a caption, as something to be emphasised - and style sheets are applied by the visitor to the site, according to the media they are using to access it. The web designer creates not one, but several style sheets for the various devices expected to visit the page.
For now, style sheet technology is not quite there yet. But it is already a much faster way to present information in an attractive and consistent fashion across a website, and should be used in basically all cases.
If a webdesigner doesn't use style sheets, they are making their own work more complicated than it needs to be, and your site more difficult to use. Ask them why.
What web standards do your sites comply with?
The internet is always changing. And there are many different forces pushing change - and not all in the same direction. New features are created by software companies, either producers of the technology, like Macromedia's Flash animations, or producers of web browsers, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape's Navigator.
Each of these innovation pushes the web in a different, and sometimes contradictory, direction. The danger is that websites become browser-specific: this one only works if you have Netscape, that one only works if you have Explorer with Flash installled. The more that this happens, the less useful the internet becomes.
Cutting against this tendency is the concept of internet standards. Agreed definitions of features, so that the same feature works the same way on every site, and in every browser, makes the web easier to use. Where standards exist, it is important to use them, even if the design impact of not using them is tempting.
As a minimum, websites should be designed to meet the World Wide Web Consortium's standard definition of HTML - preferably using xhtml (which has been the approved standard since January 2000, but since many 'easy' web authoring tools don't understand it, it is still not widely implemented) or html 4.0 - and CSS, and also meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, written to ensure that people with disabilities, or with non-standard equipment for accessing the internet, can still make reliable use of the world wide web.
Designers who don't think standards matter may produce sparkling websites for the particular browser they (or you) are using. But you can't be sure that your visitors have the same facilities. And you can't be confident about future developments on the web - the future will be built on today's standards, not on proprietary tricks, no matter how clever the results of them may be.
Do you carry out usability tests?
Actually, so few web designers in the UK carry out formal usability tests (I have found one other that mentions it on their website) that it is very difficult to recommend that you insist on it.
However, usability testing is fundamental to good web design.
In the USA, the case for considering usability as a design issue has been gaining ground in the last few years. Style sheets, web accessibility guidelines and usability testing are all results of that move. Usability testing is not free, but it is not expensive either.
Designers used to avoid it, and in many cases still do, because it 'restricted' their freedom of expression. But web design is not an art form, it is a medium of communication. If a web site doesn't communicate its message, or doesn't enable effective navigation around the site, then it has failed, irrespective of the creative flair of the designer. Usability testing is the essential pre-launch phase of confirming that the objectives of the site will be met by the design as it has been implemented.
The reality is that all sites are tested for usability. The good ones are tested before they are launched, corrected and refined on the basis of those tests, and then launched on the community. The others are launched first, then tested by the intended users, and, if found wanting, avoided in favour of the competition. The only way to avoid this happening, and the associated extra costs of redesign, relaunch and restoring credibility, is to test reliably before launching the site.
How do you tackle accessibility issues?
Accessibility means two things in the internet world. Firstly, as in the real world, it means ensuring that people with disabilities can still make use of the internet.
Browsers which read websites to blind or partially-sighted people are the most obvious method of acheiving this, and they rely extensively on the concept of style sheets. So a designer who doesn't use style sheets is unlikely to produce accessible pages.
Other aspects of accessibility are addressed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are agreed and monitored by the W3C. Websites which deliver on the requirements of these standards can be expected to render useful information for users who have sensory or manipulative disabilities.
The other, related, aspect of accessibility concerns the wide variation in hardware and software used to access the web. Accessible web sites should render meaningfully irrespective of the devices used to access them. This goal is far from easy, and no designer that promises you 100% compatibility with every possible device can be trusted.
But good web design can acheive a great deal, and there is no excuse for not making the effort. You want a web designer that understands accessibility issues, and produces sites that at least meet all the priority one guidelines in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Have you worked on sites like mine before?
Designers all have particular skills and interests. If you've got content that is exclusively text, there's no point enaging a designer whose portfolio looks like the Tate Gallery. If you're a small business, you'll probably want a designer who has worked with other businesses in your field, so that they can understand your objectives and particular needs. But this can go too far, too. Avoid designers who don't let you get a word in edgeways. "We've done websites for more shoeshops than you've had hot dinners," may sound impressive, but if they all look the same, the chances are yours will too.
What software do you use?
The source of much disagreement amongst web designers, this question is, to a degree, something of a red herring.
It doesn't matter, of course, what software a web designer uses, provided that the sites they produce are usable, accessible, attractive and functional.
Some designers insist that this isn't possible unless the source code for the pages is produced by hand, using only a very basic text editor. Designers who used to be programmers tend to prefer to write the HTML code by hand, and, while it certainly does give them more control the process is likely to be slower than using software to automate some of the tasks.
Others make use of fully-featured site creation packages like Microsoft's Front Page, Adobe's GoLive or Macromedia's Fireworks. Using software to help may make certain otherwise-complicated things easy, especially in relation to graphics, animation and interactivity, but the general rule is that software-generated sites are less accessible, slower to load, and less likely to adhere to web-wide standards than hand-written pages.
This is especially true of Microsoft's Front Page, which appears to assume that everyone uses Microsoft's web browser, and that web standards are annoying limitations to be avoided rather than useful markers to be followed. I would never use Front Page for anything at all, but I know some web designers do use it.
My preference is to write the HTML for each individual page by hand, but to use software both to manipulate images and to assemble and manage websites as a whole. Naturally, I would recommend you to find a web designer who follows a similar approach, since I believe it makes the best of both possibilities.
How much do you charge?
How long is a piece of string? Or, perhaps, how much do you want to pay?
I would steer clear of web designers who charge per page rather than per hour. The reason for this is that charging by the page introduces the cost factor into the decisions about how to stucture the content of the site. The web designer will be paid more if you split the content into more pages, so they're in favour of doing it, and you're, of course, against it. Instead of the decision being based on how the content itself is best arranged, it becomes the subject of a wrangle about how much to pay your designer.
Some sites need lots of short pages, others work better with fewer, more extensive pages. Why should one cost more than the other, if the basic amount of work involved is no different? Too many sites suffer from 'cram-it-all-on-one-page' syndrome already, so don't add yours to the list.
However, once you've discussed your objective with the designer, they ought to be able to give you a fixed quote for the work involved. And many designers will offer to discuss the project with you without charge first, like thewebtailor does.
There may be some extras, depending on whether you need hosting arranging, commercial scripts writing or licensing, and so on, but you should expect to get a costed work programme agreed before you start handing over money.
Don't be surprised if you are asked to pay a proportion of the cost up front. Anything more than a very small alteration to an existing site takes significant time, and once that time is gone, no-one else is going to pay for the work done, if you suddenly disappear from the scene. Web designers need to eat, just like everyone else, and taking a proportion (I would usually ask for 25%) up front is a reasonable protection .
By the same token, don't pay the rest until you are really satisfied. Certainly, the best designers want their customers to be happy, and will make certain that you are before they sign off the project, and many, like the webtailor, will encourage you to review the site fully for a while before finally confirming that it has been completed.
However, there is always the chance that your designer has forgotten something. Once you've paid over the fee, the danger is that their objective is now to find the next customer, not to finish off the site you've alreayd paid them for. So make sure you really are happy before you pay.
If for any reason you are not happy with your site, try to put your concerns in writing. This will make it easier to define them, and thus to fix them. Assume that your web designer has made an honest, rather than a malicious, mistake, and try to make it as easy as possible to put things right and give you what you want, and are paying for. If, despite this, your designer still isn't giving you what you want then you need to consider whether you are asking the impossible. If not, you may have reached the moment to look elsewhere for help.
Do you also offer web hosting?
Probably, the answer to look for here is 'no'. Some web designers do offer hosting, but those that do are often neither quality designers nor quality hosts but a mish-mash of the two.
For a small basic site, a web designer that hosts may save you some money, but in almost all other cases it pays to shop around for the best designer you can afford and the best host you can afford, rather than settle for someone who isn't the best of either.
Note that this is not the same as asking whether you designer can help you find a good host. Certainly they should be able and willing to do this: after all, they work with web hosts all the time, they should be aware of which hosts are reliable and which are not, which ones have good offers for particular features or facilities, and which ones are well-established and well-equiped.
Some designers act as agents for particular hosting companies, so it is worth asking about any relationship of this kind up front. If you think you're being recommended a host because they're good, you don't want to find out afterwards that you were being recommended one because it paid commission.
Can you teach me to update the site myself?
First of all, of course, you need to decide whether you want to do this.
Be prepared to pay for training, if it is going to be anything worth spending your time on. If your web designer charges £30 or £40 per hour designing websites, then it is not likely that they can afford to devote a day or two to training someone without getting paid for it.
On the other hand, you should expect, especially if the contract was a significant one, some time spent with the designer at the end of the project, debriefing, and confirming that everything in the original work programme has, in fact, been completed. You should also expect to get a permanent back-up copy of the website, on floppy, CD or whatever, and possibly paper printouts, too, although these are of limited value. None of these things constitutes 'training', though.
A training programme needs to enable you to alter content on the site, without detrimentally affecting the presentation. If, after training, you can't add new pages or alter the content of existing ones without it being obvious which bits are old and which new, then you haven't had your money's worth.
The alternative, of course, is to pay someone else to do this work on a regular basis for you, and the best person, provided you are still on speaking terms, is probably your web designer. So ask about maintenance contracts, regular or occasional updating, or whatever other arrangment will suit you best.
Any comments?
These pages are intended to be informative and helpful. I would like to know if you've found them helpful, or if you think they can be improved. Get in touch if you have comments or suggestions.
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