What makes a good Web Design Company?
Web design is many things to many people. A Web Designer’s role continually changes and expands. I still remember the days when everyone was called a webmaster. Webmasters were skilled in HTML. Sometimes they were the computer power user in a company. Oftentimes they were a departmental secretary who was thrown into web design even as another job they had to do. Thank goodness the word “webmaster” has fallen from popularity.
So what really makes a good web design company? No one can accomplish all the roles that a website design requires. One of the biggest keys to my successes was to recognize the talents of my colleagues and leverage their talents with mine. I have a colleague who can write beautiful CSS Zengarden quality designs. I recognize his skills in layout designs as much better than my own. While I still do some frontend design, most of the time I hire out my frontend design. A good web designer or developer recognizes their weaknesses and finds team members to fill in the weak spots as needed.
You need to recognize your strong points, work on your weaknesses and hire others to work on the parts you can’t get done. If you have a larger company, you hire employees to work for you. It’s ok not to be great at all facets of designing and promoting a website.
How far has “Web Design” come?
In the early days we were all “webmasters” which as I said has fallen out of popularity. Web design companies now include so many different skill sets. Besides web designer who sometimes does the layout comps or sometimes that’s done by the graphic designer/artist working in Photoshop followed by the web designer breaking down design into frontend code. Of course sometimes they call a web designer a frontend coder particularly if they are incorporating Javascript or AJAX. Then we have web developers who program the backend of a website in a number of technologies ranging from PHP, Ruby, Perl, ASP, ASP.NET with anyone of a number of databases from Access to SQL Server, MySQL and/or Postgres. Copywriters often work with Search Engine Optimization Experts as well as the newer Search Media Optimization. The point is that new job descriptions have expanded in the last 10 years and will probably continue to expand as new technologies are developed.
So what makes a good Web Design company?
To be honest, anyone can learn all of those jobs or a few of them and really know their stuff. However just as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and so is web design. The best judges are clients. They choose a web design company based on their current needs. Sometimes those needs are small and satisfied by a guy using Frontpage and other times they can only be satisfied by a team of developers working for months to produce a dynamic website with hundreds of pages and customer interaction and community building features. It’s all in the eye of the client. Big or small, cutting edge or just getting started, each web design company can find work and do well in web design.
Customer Service is the Key
What differentiates one web design company from another? It’s customer service. How many of you have gone into a restaurant received poor service or bad food then returned to that restaurant? My biggest successes with clients have always come when I delivered good customer service and what the client asked for in the first place. Delivering 110% always sweetens the deal in the eyes of a client. It’s also a great way to get referrals. Referrals can drive a web design company from obscurity into a thriving business. So ask yourself, “What have I done for my clients lately?” then follow through and do something more for them. They are your bread and butter.
Web Out
Des
Affordable Web Design:
Like you said, customer service is the key…as well as giving the customer what they wanted .. as long as you can do that. I’ve had customers come to me saying that their ‘old’ web designer made a lot of promises that they couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t keep. But I guess that all falls into customer service.
Desirea Herrera:
I agree. You have to know your strengths and weaknesses then be prepared to hire out what you can’t do yourself.
What Do You Think?