Before Hiring A Web Designer
©1999 Cyndi Egbert
Web designers are a dime a dozen these days. Anyone can purchase Microsoft® FrontPage® (or a similar program), create a homepage and offer to hire out their services designing websites (and many do). It's one thing to create a site for personal use even when not much is known about the process and quite another thing to offer for sale expertise (the assumption made on the part of the purchaser) that is not in existence.
There are plenty of poorly done websites online for which a handsome price was paid. This problem is most distressing for the small business owner as s/he often does not have the funds available to pay a competent professional to redo or repair shoddy work. Thus it becomes of utmost importance to recognize quality work before hiring someone to create your site. After all, if "good enough" were sufficient, it would be cheaper to purchase a webpage program and do it yourself.
The following tips can help you identify a competent web designer or improve your self-made pages by giving them some of the special touches that identify quality work. (I would suggest requesting at least three examples to review before retaining any services.)
This list is as important for knowing which things don't necessarily reflect on the web designer as for knowing which things do.
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Broken links- if the page you are viewing is more than a few weeks old, it is probably not the web designer's fault if some of the off-site links are no longer working. The web changes very quickly and a page that was there yesterday may not be there tomorrow. If, however, the broken links are to other pages within the site, it's a red flag for shoddy work.
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Special effects- many duffers have an impressive array of special effects on their websites. People are wowed by the tricks and don't notice that it's the only thing done properly on the page. This is important for two reasons. One is that the commands necessary for these effects are available for free on the internet. This means that anyone with web access and a search engine can find and recreate these effects with very little time or effort (i.e. it's no big deal). Reason number two is that these types of things damage load time significantly. If people surfing to your site can't quickly assess your page or even get knocked offline because you have too much "stuff" on your site, it won't bring you any business or return visits. Each graphic, each special effect, each audio file adds significantly to your load time. If this is not taken into consideration, the website is not useful to your audience and therefore not helpful to you.
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Backgrounds- it's feasible to overlook background choices and accompanying graphics. If they are poorly done, feel free to ask the designer if s/he created them before making a decision. Many times the client adamantly insists on a background that is less than optimal and the designer has to work within those limitations. Even so, if every page you view by a particular designer has terrible graphics and overwhelming backgrounds, that may be the designer's personal style and needs to be taken into consideration.
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Text- the text appearance is something that is within the designer's realm to fix so if you can't read the text on the page, you probably don't want this person designing your page. Some people leave the text color in default, which means the text appears in the color that is specified by your computer. This is acceptable if there is no background image or color, but it is sloppy if there's a background. If one aspect of the page (i.e. the background) is changed all aspects of the page (i.e. the text color and link colors as needed) must be changed to ensure viewability.
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Graphics- there are several points to consider when assessing graphics. Alternate tags and size specifications are signs of attention to detail which is important. Many less experienced web designers leave out size specs and alt tags, while the more professional designers do so only by accident. The alt tag is the name that pops up when you place the cursor over a graphic. Occasionally this will not pop up even when it's supposed to, but you usually see something if there is a tag specified. There are two ways to tell if the graphic sizes have been specified (which is important to load time). One is that you will see a box in the proper size while the page is loading. If a size is not specified, you will see a very small box that flows into the proper size as the graphic loads. The second way is more complicated and requires knowing a little bit about HTML. If you right-click over a text area on a page, you can choose "view source" or "view page source" and view the entire HTML coding. When looking for graphics files, you are looking for IMG SRC="image.jpg" (or something similar) and then ALT=#, HEIGHT=#, WIDTH=#. If you don't find those last three attached to any of the IMG SRC codes, you might want to continue your search for a web designer. Also keep in mind that any designer worth the price will suggest keeping graphics (especially animated graphics) to a minimum, but again, sometimes we have a client who has very specific ideas and we have to make compromises.
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Frames- multiple "windows" on one webpage are known as frames. The purpose of frames is to allow only one part of the page to reload as you switch from page to page. It is supposed to reduce load time by keeping the graphics and links constantly on the screen while you are surfing the site. Poorly done frames may actually reload all of the windows (doubling or tripling load time) with each page change. They can also "trap" you in the frames, causing the next page you visit to appear within the frame specified by the last page. Many people like frames because they look "fancy" but they reduce the viewable screen area (particularly if a site has more than one extra window set on the screen), increase the initial load time and some computers don't even support them. Frames may shut down an older computer altogether.
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META tags- these are descriptive words and phrases that the search engines often use to categorize your page. This is very important and frequently overlooked by less experienced designers. The only way to check for the META tags is to right-click on the page and select "view page source" because these tags are invisible. They are clearly marked "META=" right near the top of the HTML codes and the ones of concern say "KEYWORDS=" and "DESCRIPTION=" although there may be other tags listed (generally automatically added by most web design software). If the designer you choose doesn't use them, your page will not be picked up properly by the all of search engines and potential customers won't be able to find your site.
Hopefully these suggestions will be helpful. When mediocre designers are paid to perform services for which they are not qualified, we all lose. Happy designer hunting!
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