Developing a website for your company can seem like the biggest roadblock between you and your customers. It could be even more aggravating if you hire someone who doesn’t exactly know what they’re doing. Here are six major signs that your web designer is fooling you into thinking they know what they’re doing, even if they don’t.
1. They Don’t Ask Questions
Your web designer should be asking you tons of questions during the initial discovery meeting. There are several key pieces of information a designer needs to know in order to effectively meet your online goals. See if they ask things like, what are the demographics of your client base, who are your competitors, and what are your future goals for your business. These baseline questions should be followed up with more detailed inquiries, but if your web designer isn’t asking anything at all, you should be wary that your website may not be a proper reflection of your company.
2. They Don’t Use Project Management Software
If your web designer isn’t using a project management system, that’s a red flag. It means they don’t have a process, which indicates they are unorganized, inexperienced, or are simply unprofessional. Lack of a process and poor organization means it’ll take a lot longer to build your site than it should. Your web designer probably runs into tasks and forgets about them frequently. This leaves your site teeming with mistakes, costing you more money in the long-run.
3. They Communicate Poorly
The best way to quickly get your website up and running is to have frequent communication. When all you get is radio silence from your designer, it can leave you worried and unsettled. You are left wondering what stage of the process they are on, or whether they are working on your project at all. Often, when a web designer falls short in communication it means they don’t know what they are doing or they lack drive in their work. Both of which signify that you should hire a new web designer ASAP.
4. They Don’t Bother to Test Cross Browser Compatibility
Just because you and your designer use one browser, doesn’t mean the whole world does. If you are trying to reach your target market with a site that isn’t compatible with all browsers, your business is going to take a serious hit. Never let a web designer convince you that a cross browser test isn’t necessary. Always double check to make sure your site has proper functionality on desktop AND mobile.
5. They Don’t Use a Content Management System (CMS)
A bad web designer will tell you that a content management system is for “fake” developers. They couldn’t be more wrong. Integrating a CMS like WordPress into a website allows the client control over the content of their site. With a CMS, you can add any content you want without having to ask the developer to go in and fix things for you. This saves time and effort for everyone involved.
6. They Don’t Have a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy
Your website can be the best thing to ever grace the internet, but if your target audience can’t find you then it might as well not be there at all. Search Engine Optimization is the way Google allows you to be heard among all the sites in the world wide web. SEO is what drives traffic to a website. A designer that doesn’t bother to learn about SEO, won’t be worried about the success of your business.
Website developers are supposed to make the process easier on you. If your designer isn’t doing the work that your company needs, it’s time to make a change. Contact us to have any questions answered.
The rest of the things are fine but I think that SEO cannot be used as an indicator to check whether web designer is honest or fooling you. Being a creative director at Foundry512, I consider web designing is a very different field from SEO and one needs to hire two different professionals to bring full perfection to web designs. Even web developers are not so much superb in SEO, then how can a designer who mostly dealing with graphics will be.
This is a good point, Henry. SEO is a different field entirely, and it often takes separate set of skills to execute it effectively. I believe the post author meant a strategy must be in place and a developer should, at the very minimum, build in technologies that allow for implementation, albeit by a different professional.
Thanks for the note, though. We appreciate the feedback!