Finding a web design and development company for your website is like finding a contractor to build your house. You want a house that not only looks good but serves its purpose, reliable and stands the test of time. You will need to conduct thorough research to ensure that the company has been in the industry for some years with a proven track record of success, and that their design and development team members are experienced in what they do.

One of the first steps in the selection process is to evaluate the company’s website and their own work and portfolio. Their work quality should speak for itself. Be sure to pay careful attention not only to the quality and sophistication of the design, intuitive navigation, use of white space, call-to-actions, user experience, first reaction or initial impressions, consistency and whether the site truly reflect the brand and professional image and how the site fares among the competition. Look at their attention to detail and if you know a little bit of HTML, check to see if the code is clean. Look for meta tags such as page titles, page description and their strategic use of keywords. Each page should be unique, descriptive and optimized for the search engines and that their website has high search engine rankings for keywords relevant to their business.

Ask specific questions regarding their technical expertise:

• Do they outsource any of their work or they do everything in-house?
• How do they test and what their quality control process is like?
• Do they test on Mac and PC and what browsers they test the site on?
• Do they offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click campaign (PPC) services?
• Do they use any templates or is everything they do is fully custom?
• Where is the website hosted?
• Do they consider accessibility and strictly adhere to web standards?
• Do they practice responsive web design or mobile first approach?
• What are some of the latest technologies they are using to develop websites?
• What content management system (CMS) do they support and recommend?

Check their clients’ testimonials to see how their past/current clients feel about their customer service. Make sure you find a company that will take your calls and return your emails and requests in a timely fashion. You should be able to tell if the company would work quickly by how promptly they return your estimate request, however, an estimate request for a custom website may take some time to actually prepare and put it all together. Carefully review the proposal, you can easily tell if a company took the time to look over the details of your project and then carefully planned a development strategy to meet your objectives.

As far as price or project cost is concerned, you can try ask what return of investment you will get from your new website. Would you pay $3,000 dollars for a cookie-cutter website that was quickly put together and wouldn’t achieve any business goals, generate any new leads nor help your business grow, or you would rather spend $30,000 on a website that generates the leads, grows sales, generates the buzz and brings in new businesses and customers. Obviously, the $30,000 website offers a far much better value.

For a high quality web site that delivers real results, check out our professional website design and development services.