If you are running a business and looking to find potential customers online, you need a stunning website. Be it a simple CMS website with some information pages or a fully functional eCommerce website, you need to find a professional and reliable website design company to build a website that not only attracts visitors but helps you to generate sales.
When there is a number of designers and developers available to select from, it becomes tough to select someone who is reliable and experienced enough to provide the best return on your web project investment.
You may know about asking some basic questions like how much it cost, how much time it will take etc, but there are some tricky questions that you might not know about and are very crucial to ask your next web design agency to select the best.
Here we have put together a detailed list of web design questions that will help you to understand whether the web designers/developers will be able to help effectively to achieve your goal or not.
No matter, You ask these questions to your web design and development company in a face-to-face meeting or over the phone call – It will help you to learn who they are and if they are the best suitable for your specific project needs.
Questions to Ask Web Designers and Developers:
1) How Many Years of Web Design & Development Experience Do You Have?
With this question, you should aim to find a company that has at least 4-5 years of experience in building websites. The more the experience, the more beneficial it will be for you. You can visit their social media profiles to know more.
2) How Much Do You Charge to Build a Website?
The price for a website depends on many factors like how much experience designers/developers have, what type of website you are looking to build, what set of custom functionalities you need etc.
Find out if they will be charging a fixed price for the entire project or if they charge on an hourly basis so you can compare with the other service providers you are considering.
If you are looking to build an eCommerce website with lots of custom functionalities, You should consider going with a fixed cost estimate with a detailed scope of the working document in place so that you can allocate the necessary budget in advance.
The scope of the work contract with clear terms and conditions protects you and your designer both so you should make sure to get one.
In general, you get what you pay for so you should be ready to pay more to a professional and experienced eCommerce website development company in comparison with other freelancers.
3) Can You Provide URLs of the Top 5 Websites That You Have Built?
After taking a look at the best websites that they have built, you would be able to judge if they can build the website or web application of your choice or not. You can check in the example sites if they have any experience in building websites similar to what you are looking for.
You should ask for their detailed past project case studies. What type of work they have done in the past and what type of website performance improvement results they have delivered.
Experienced Designers and developers will not have any problems in showing you their project cases. studies
4) Which Web Platform Will be Used to Build the Website and Why?
There are a number of different web platforms available to build websites. Some of them are paid and some are open source. You should ask your web developers which platform they will be using with the reason behind going with any specific platform.
If you are looking to build an eCommerce website, any professional Magento 2 development company will suggest going with the Magento eCommerce platform.
Every platform has some Pros and cons so you should go with the team offering the best suitable platform for your needs. You should do some basic research on the web to know about the advantages and disadvantages of the platform you want to go with since it will impact massively on the long-term success of your website and another ongoing maintenance cost in the future.
5) How Long it Will Take to Finish My Website?
Ask them how much time it will take to finish the project and discuss deadlines with any penalties if applicable so that you can plan other marketing activities accordingly once the website is live.
During the project life cycle, you would need to allocate some time on a regular basis to review the progress and provide necessary feedback so you need to plan your schedule accordingly.
6) How Many Rounds of Design Revision Will be Done?
During the design phase, It may happen that you don’t like the design drafts that web designers are preparing for your web pages and you may need revisions to be made to get the designs of your choice so ask them if they allow revisions during design and development phase of the project, Also check if they provide design mock ups for mobile and tablet interfaces.
A reputed eCommerce website design company will not limit the number of design revisions and they will not be happy until you are. After all, you should be happy with the final designs.
7) What Payment terms Do You Offer?
Ask this in order to check if their payment terms work based on the completion of different phases of the project or not & what advance funds you need to deposit etc.
This will help you to arrange the necessary funds to avoid any delays in payment and keep your development team happy. Avoid design and development teams that need full funding in advance.
8) Will the Website be Optimized for Minimum Loading Speed?
This is very important since the loading speed of your website can make or break your online business. Google is considering your website speed as a ranking factor and your potential customers will switch to your competitors if your website is not loading within 3-4 seconds max on desktops and mobile devices.
9) Do You Optimize Websites to Show on Search Engines?
Check if your web development agency has an in-house team of professional SEO experts who can help designers and developers to implement required SEO measures during the development process and if they will charge extra for this or not.
It is very important that your website is well optimized for search engines so that your potential customers can easily find your business online. SEO should be incorporated into your design and development process.
10) Can I Update the Website Myself After it is Finished and Operational?
You should check this in order to make sure that you will be getting user friendly and easy-to-manage back-end interface for your website so that you can update content/pictures, add blog posts, etc on your own without having the need to contact your developers every time for any simple updates required.
Check about what parts of the website you would be able to update in the future and what not.
11) Who Will Write the Content for the Website?
Do they have a copywriter in the team who can write content for the website pages or do you need to arrange the content?
If you are going to write the necessary content, check if they will provide proper guidelines to write the best-optimized content with the required length and keywords to be included for SEO.
12) What Type of Support Do You Offer After the Website is Finished and Live?
Ask if they offer ongoing maintenance and support services after the website is finished and live. What if you find after a week that some features of the site are not working well or have some bugs? Do they offer free bug-fixing support?
13) What Other Info Will be Required from My End?
Other than writing content for the website, what other info will be required from your end. Check if you need to arrange the pictures required for the website or if they will arrange it. If they will do the logo design work or you would need to arrange a logo for your brand etc. Discuss your responsibility during the process.
14) Would You be Happy to Provide Some of Your Customer References?
It is always good to discuss with their existing/past customers to know about their good or bad experience of working with the designers and developers. Honest & professional WooCommerce website development services providers will not have any problems in sharing contact details of their past customers with potential customers.
15) What Will be the Communication Process During the Entire Project?
Effective communication is the most important factor behind the success of any web design and development project. Ask to check for the mode of communication during project – They will be using email communication or any project management tool? How frequent you will get progress updates from your development team?
16) My Website Will be Secure?
With the hacking and malware attack news here and there in these days, you should check with your web development team about their capacity to secure your website against any such threat in future. What type of security implementation policy they follow while building a website?
17) Do You Offer Hosting Services?
Check if they offer hosting services and if they don’t, do they suggest any best options based on their past experience and the type of website you have? You need to select the best hosting since it will have a huge impact on the performance of your website.
Usually web developers and designers work with different hosting companies so they know pros and cons of different providers and how effective their support is. You should check and compare different options available before selecting one for your website and the assistance of your web developers would be of great benefit.
18) How Do You Test Your Work to Ensure the Utmost Quality?
Your web development company should have a sound testing policy in place to ensure the final product is bug-free. Check what testing methodologies they use to test your website on different browsers and devices.
19) Do You Provide Website Back End Training?
This is a very important question. Once the website is developed and live, it is essential for you to understand how the admin area of the website works and how you can update different sections of website. Check if they provide website back end training as part of the project.
20) How Do I Measure Results After the Site Goes Live?
Ask about what type of results you should expect from your website after it is live. How can you check traffic on the website? How can you measure conversion rate etc? Do they configure Google analytics and webmaster tools for you to track visitors’ traffic on the website?
Conclusion:
The growth of M-commerce and digital currencies in today’s world has pushed every business to start their website, webshop or mobile app to be on top of this opportunity.
Building an awesome website can be difficult if you don’t know some basic rules & the key to success is finding the right team of designers, developers, and Shopify SEO Experts with years of experience to deliver a result driven website.
A web design and development agency with proven track record should be able to answer all 20 questions effectively.
