Homework you need to do before shopping for web designer

Oftenly individual or company start shopping for web designers without preparing their requirements for a project. They fully rely on web designers to suggest ideas for their business. We believe nobody understand your business than YOU, you can’t rely on web designers to help gaining your customer satisfaction.

Before you hire your next web designer, take some time to make sure that you do your homework first. It is important to know exactly what your own needs are before expecting someone else (i.e., your web designer) to satisfy those needs. A little preparation will go a long way to making sure you are not disappointed (at best) or ripped off (at worst).

Before you begin your search for a web designer:

1. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want your website to do. Write down all of your ideas. Start to organize them into bullet-point lists (like this one).
2. Clearly document your short-term and long-term goals. You need to be very clear about what you want your site to be, and what you want it to do.
3. Will there be any custom features or programming requirements for your site? This includes (but is not limited to) eCommerce integration, user account management, interactive features, file uploads, etc.
4. Who is your target market? Who is the intended audience of your site? What are you going to be offering them that is unique or compelling?
5. What do you want your site to look like? What is the look-and-feel that you are going for? Do you have a logo design?
6. Search for competitor web sites and note what you like and don't like about them.
7. Document what your competitors are doing right... and wrong. Identify opportunities to do better on both counts.
8. Establish a budget range for your project. It is OK to walk before you run. Perhaps you should consider breaking up your project into two or more phases. You can often minimize your risk (and money spent) if you can create a "proof of concept" website first to measure consumer or client interest. Then build and launch subsequent versions or features as your site begins to succeed.