How to Choose a Website Design Company

For a company doing business in the modern world having an online presence is extremely important. Big companies couldn't afford not having a company website and small companies need one if you want to be taken seriously. More often than not your future clients will go to the internet and search for your company name to learn what your company can do for them. Search engines give preference to the official company website when someone is searching for a company name. When your future clients search for your company name and your website is listed at the top search result they will sense that your company is not a small fry but a professional one and running a serious business.

If you have a dedicated IT department in your company you should let them do the work of building the company website. They are already in the company so they understand what should be put on the website and what not. If you don't have the techies to do the job then outsourcing the work to a professional web design or web development company is the answer. But how do you choose on from the myriad of choices out there?

Do you happen to have a friend who outsources the whole website building to a website design company? If so ask him about it. Check his website and see if you like the work. Asking a referral from someone you know and trust is the most reliable method of choosing a web design company since you will most likely get an honest review.

If you don't know anyone who outsource their web building work then you should go online and search for one. Go to your favorite search engine and search for "web design company" or "web development company". For each company listed in the top ten check their portfolios. You can also send them emails saying that you are interested in their service and you'd like to see references. Check the company websites they have made and see if the are sites looking good or not to you and test their functionality too (is it easy to get around from one page to another)? If you like a site take note and when you have fully investigate all the web sites send an email to each of them and ask the following questions:
1. How was their experience with the web design company?
2. How many referrals/clients/sales coming from their website?
3. Do they have problems maintaining the site?

From the answers you received nail down the web design companies that provide the best service for their clients and ask them the followings:
1. Can they build you a website that will receive a lot of visitors?
2. Can they design the site so those visitors convert into clients or customers?
3. Will they teach your staff to do the site maintenance so you won't have to ask them for every little thing?

Those three are the important questions you must ask before deciding which companies to choose. Feel free to ask other questions that you have in mind. Good companies should be able to give you satisfying answers with logical reasoning behind their answers.

Why do you have to go through all this trouble to find the right company? Wouldn't it be easier to check online forums and read reviews about those companies?

Sadly, not all company is honest. Some would go as low as posting fake reviews in forums all around the internet. Sometimes they bad-mouth their competitors to turn customers away from them. When you read reviews in a forum you must check if the forum member who post it is a reputable member and not an unknown quantity who just registered to the forum for a couple days and had very few posts. In the end it would be wiser to spend some time to do your own research instead of making a business decision based on reviews by unknown person in an online forum.