Hiring a website designer takes a lot of thought and strategy. Like most things nowadays, there are so many options that it can feel overwhelming and difficult to find the right web designer in Hawkes Bay for you.
Here are five things that can help you narrow down your candidates.
The proof is in the pudding, right?! Website designers often showcase a range of work on their websites so you can see the quality and have a play around to see if you like them. Look for a portfolio that has a range of different design styles such as bold, soft, quirky or plain and has a mix of general and e-commerce websites.
Take a look at their Google or Facebook reviews. How many do they have? And are they mostly positive or negative? If they are mostly negative, stay clear and look for an alternative option. If they are mostly positive, great! Add them to your list of candidates.
If you want to double-check a review to make sure it’s legitimate, pick up the phone and give the company (who made the review) a call, tell them that you’re considering hiring the web designer, and get their honest thoughts and recommendation.
Most companies offer support but of course it’s for a price. Sometimes it’s a monthly fee with an allocated amount of hours per month, and sometimes it’s an hourly rate.
If you can do most of the content updates yourself, or you don’t think you’ll need many updates, opt in for an hourly rate basis. The web designer will quote you for the work required which ensures you aren’t wasting money on paying for monthly support when you don’t use it.
On the other hand, if you aren’t confident in updating your website and you would prefer for the web designer to do it for you, choose a monthly support option depending on how many hours will be required each month. The allocated hours can always be changed to make sure you’re not wasting money.
If they don’t offer support at all (which is very rare), don’t consider them. Once your website is live and something breaks, who’s going to fix it?
To have your website visible on the internet, you need to have it “hosted” somewhere which costs money. Think of it as renting a space on the internet. You need space to store your website, files, images and text. And the bigger your website is the more space you’ll need.
The hosting fees also will vary depending on the type of website that you have such as a Wordpress, Webflow or Squarespace site. And whether you have a general or e-commerce (online store) website. So as you can see there are a lot of factors that go into choosing the right hosting solution but your website designer will be able to advise on the best option for you.
Hosting can cost anywhere from $20 a month right up to $500+ for those massive online stores that have lots of products and process lots of orders. So make sure you can fit hosting into your monthly budget and keep your invoices or receipts so you can claim it as a business expense at tax time.
A website can take anywhere from two weeks to three months to make depending on the functionality and design requirements. When getting quotes from each web designer, confirm how quickly they can get the website live for you. This is a huge consideration if you need a website quickly as some companies have a waitlist and you could be waiting a lot longer than you’d hoped for!
After you've connected with a handful of web designers in Hawkes Bay, you'll know in your gut when you've chosen the right one. They'll likely stay with you for years to come and be your go-to website guru when you need them.
All the best with your web designer hunt!
