Let us start from scratch. You are a business owner and are planning to create a website or redesign an existing one. And you face a couple of questions on your way to a feasible product. If you want to find a good web designer, you may use your social media networking contacts to help you or ask for referrals.
In this post, we will provide you with practical pieces of advice to help you in hiring a web designer.
Estimate your website needs
What kind of website development do you need – website designing or website coding? You must be able to distinguish between the following types of professionals: a graphic designer, a website designer, and a website coder. If you aim at finding a pundit in both spheres at a time, you must be also clear in your job requirements.
Let’s take a look at different types of responsibilities:
- Graphic designers are in charge of creating all the visual elements like logos, images, fonts for a website, advertising, content. Not all graphic designers will be able to create website designs, however, this combination of skills has become in demand recently.
- Website designers are responsible for designing a website: generating layouts, building prototypes, putting your ideas into practice. However, being a website designer doesn’t mean that they must code well. They might have some basic skills, but it’s not compulsory.
- Website coders use design materials to develop a tangible website with proper functionality. They are able to solve any technical problems and see the big picture. When speaking about designing skills, not all website coders must have them.
The best choice will be a person with a combination of skills of different specialties/professions. A person with good design skills may have a general knowledge of coding and vice versa. So, make a clear list of requirements when writing the job offer description.
Prepare the job offer description
This step is essential for your business website development. An inaccurate job description leads to misunderstandings, disappointment, or even frustration. You definitely need a well-thought plan and the best way is to work it out by yourself.
You need to define the type of design that you need as well as your project restrictions. Each new employee must be aware of your company policy, rules, and regulations, etc. Another key thing to complete before hiring a web designer is to create some design mockups to demonstrate all your needs. Here are some examples of mockup online generators:
In order to provide your candidate with a clear web designer job description, here is just a quick reminder of what to include:
- job title
- job summary
- responsibilities and duties
- qualifications and skills
- salary and benefits
Certainly, you should think in advance about the questions to ask a web designer before hiring them. They will help you to understand the person’s true expectations and find out whether they are ready to establish a trustworthy partnership. The questions may sound as follows:
- Which pages would you recommend for my website?
- Which management tools have you worked with?
- How do you manage the rounds of revision?
- What will you need to get the work started?
Stick to your budget
The first thing you need to remember is that you cannot always predict the accurate cost of project expenses. You can’t delegate this responsibility to the third party.
If it takes more than a day to create a design or redesign for your project, you might set up a daily budget or pay per hour. If paid by the hour, a professional website designer can perform his work more efficiently. In case of a big-scale project which lasts a couple of weeks, you can set a fixed price. This will benefit your budget management and help to do regular checkups. In order to improve your website usability, the team may need more time to check all the cases and fix critical issues. Also, you should discuss the payment for additional work before the start of work as well.
According to McKinsey’s ideas, there is a notion of “should-cost” which is easily interpreted as a calculated cost for some service or product. Moreover, there always will be a gap between expectations and reality which should be handled by detailed planning of each development stage.
Choose appropriate job portals
Let us emphasize that hiring the right person is not an easy task, though. The best idea is to start searching among your professional networks.
A referral program can also help while searching. You may adopt this word-of-mouth initiative in your business practices in order to form a solid candidates’ base.
If you want to control the process, you may use the best job portals and look for freelancers. Here you may find a bunch of decent job portals if you are looking for a website designer:
Express your preferences in visual cues
The success of your project will depend on your clear product vision and detailed plan. As a business owner, your major task is to give coherent instructions. You should create virtual boards that will include the color scheme, fonts, styles, images, and everything you would like to see in your future website or renew an existing one. It’s necessary to use visual hints while communicating and cooperating with a designer rather than verbal explanations.
Visual cooperation can ensure the desirability of your future website, preserve viability, and provide its practicality. So, let us outline the following tools for creating the mood boards:
Think thoroughly about the number of pages (roadmap)
If each page of your website has its purpose. Starting from the “Home” page ideas, through the “About” page, to the “FAQ” page. Your website must contain all the necessary pages because if you think you can add them later, consider paying additional costs for design. So, your task is to plan the structure of the whole website to make the design process expensive and time-consuming.
In addition, a roadmap of the site will highlight the process of your idea implementation, conceptualization, and style indication. Also, it will help to foresee the development phases and outline the significant milestones.
As an example, we can show you the development roadmap of IBM Quantum till 2025. The roadmap gives a website a decent image and provides the visitors with clear concepts and intentions.
Set up online cooperation
At this point you must communicate online and have a shared source with all the project materials to tackle a problem fast and efficiently. You need to provide a newly hired designer with all necessary materials like images, color schemes, fonts, headlines, etc. You may use the most useful functions of Google Docs or Dropbox to maintain efficiency of your work.
Your task is to ensure that you are on the same page and that you as the head of the project have created all the conditions for successful cooperation. Also, it’s better to ask a designer which tool for files storage they would prefer to use.
Agreement or contract
An important aspect of the cooperation are the clear timelines and the budget distribution. You should agree on these items and talk them through with your team. To avoid misunderstandings at some point of cooperation, draw up a contract or agreement with a designer.
Both of you have some assumptions, intentions, and outlook which may differ if not expressed in an understandable and coherent message. You can download a template from the web. However, it’s better to talk it through and write it by yourself to avoid inaccuracies.
Things to include in your agreement/proposal/contract:
- the client’s needs
- proposed solution
- schedule and timelines
- price
- contacts of the contractors
Don’t forget to set up an option of a digital signature as it will ease the process of signing an agreement for both sides.
Use unique content
If you run a business, you definitely won’t take the pictures for your website content by yourself. Also, here are some decent alternatives to buying stock images like Shutterstock, Unsplash, and so on. Consider taking some professional photos for your team page, it really attracts user attention. Visuals can undermine your business positions if they are ineligible, which confirms the idea that aesthetics does matter.
Hire some copywriters for creating some proper and trustworthy text content, research market demand, and distinguish the bullet points for future articles. Otherwise, your idea may suffer from inappropriate content.
You might also include some unique functions to engage a visitor like a button with a checklist or discount for registration.
Test all links and proofread all texts
Proofreading and double-checking are vital parts before beginning of the design process. It’s necessary to get all the writings done before transmitting your ideas to a designer. Use Grammarly as a text editor, check if all website links correspond and test the mobile version.
Pay extra attention to your company vision and policy as well as the explanation of company services. This is an essential part of website creation. If your goal is to redesign a website, change all the descriptions accordingly to your new strategy and.
Conclusion
You may have found above the most crucial steps on finding the best website designer for your team. Remember to draw up a contract with a designer before the process of work starts. It can be created in the form of a proposal or agreement not to go round in circles while discussing the website creation.
Moreover, to ensure website feasibility, you must implement the strategy of testing and double-checking everything. The question “How much will it cost” is left as an open as everything depends on your business needs and budget. Do not forget about your strong professional network and ask for recommendations among designers.
What’s more, you have to take liability and coordinate all stages of creating a good web design. Make each step coherent and comprehensive. Now, you are ready to get the ball rolling.
Our Pixetic team takes care of creating a customized design for your product from scratch or redesign an existing product. Contact us if you have any questions.