• Is your web designer offering you a custom design?Some web designers charge you like you’re getting a custom web design, then give you a template. There is a huge difference in price, if you are getting a template design the price should reflect that.
• Does your web designer create web standards compliant code?Designing your website to meet current web standards ensures that your site not only looks good on current web browsers, but will most likely continue to look great on future web browsers too.
• Will your web designer’s code be search engine friendly?Not the same as search engine optimization, but in some ways more important. Search engine friendly code means your website is built in such a way that search engines are able to easily index your site and can determine what it’s about.
• Will your web designer stand behind the website for the long term?Like any piece of software, many problems with a website may not crop up until after you take delivery. Will your web designer continue to provide support for any code they wrote? For how long afterwards?

We would be happy to talk with you about these or any other web design related questions, free of charge. We never charge for consultations or just friendly conversation about our industry and what you should expect.

1. You will get what you pay for
   Your nephew said he can make your website for you, he can, but it winds up being like the Rolex that you buy from some guy on the street, it looks nice but later you find out it doesn’t work. The same goes for low budget web design firms, if they are offering to do it cheap chances are they are not giving it the necessary time and attention to create a quality product, which leads us to our next point.
2. Designing a good website takes time
   To make a website that works on all browsers and platforms, downloads quickly, performs well on search engines, meets current web standards and all the other things required for a website to be successful not to mention looking good and being easy to navigate takes many many hours. In addition a really good website won’t be done quickly partly because of the next point.
3. There’s a lot of code behind a website
   When you look at a website you are just seeing the end result of a whole lot of code, try viewing a website’s source code sometime. And that is just the HTML portion, there may also be many additional files for scripts and style sheets. The point is, don’t judge a book by its cover, a web page has much more to do than just look pretty.
4. Know what you want, plan ahead
   It’s helpful if you approach your web designer with some idea of what you would like in your website. Look at your competitors websites and make notes about what you like or don’t like. Your web designer will find it much easier to be creative with some initial ideas to work around.
5. Every browser will render your website differently
   There are more different web browsers available now then ever and each handles things a little bit differently. What your site looks like on your browser is not what it looks like on everybody’s browsers. There is no way to make one website render identically on every web browser, the goal is to allow it to degrade gracefully.
6. Every screen resolution and monitor will make your website look different
   This is like the previous point, depending on the monitor being used and the screen resolution along with various other settings like color depth, your website will look very different from one computer to another. It is often a game of compromises to make it look as good as possible on all and the best on the most monitors.
7. Fonts will look different on different computers
   Windows and Macintoshes handle fonts very differently, furthermore the individual fonts on a computer vary widely. So this is yet another example of what may look one way on your computer may look different on another, once again the web designer looks for a compromise that looks the best on most computers.
8. Honor Google, it holds the keys to online success
   Google has about 43% of the web search market to the nearest competitor, Yahoo’s 28%. Any website hoping to be at least mildly successful online needs to do well on Google which means playing by their rules for search engine optimization.
9. Visitors will not flock to your site when it’s done
   The road to internet success is littered with the remains of websites that have failed to make an impression in the market. The key thing to remember is that a successful website does not just happen. People need to be able to find your website on the search engines when searching for relevant keywords. You will need to promote your website to current and prospective clients. And one other thing is required to make it successful, our next point.
10. Your website will need to change… often
    People will return to a website that changes often, but not to a brochure website. The most successful websites are those that are more than just static information about your company, consider incorporating a business blog, community forum, RSS news feeds, photo gallery or at the very least have the ability to go in and change things around occasionally.

The problem is that business persons who pay to have a website developed often don’t know how to judge their website’s performance initially beyond its looks. In the long term they will notice if it is not getting new business but even then they are often not sure what specifically is wrong or how to fix it.

If your website is sputtering we recommend a 10 point website inspections of all moving parts. Here’s the rundown of what’s involved.

You should check:

1. HTML code formatting
2. Download time
3. Image optimization
4. Browser compatibility
5. Search engine optimization
6. Keyword density
7. Keyword popularity
8. Inbound links
9. Outbound links
10. Google PageRank

With those 10 critical points tuned up your site will be purring like a kitten and ready to tear up the road.

Liquid Design can run your website up on the lift, check it out, and provide you our honest appraisal of what it needs free of charge. You will also get a written report of the results of our tests to keep and bring to your own web guy if you want. No obligation and no hard-sell.