Choosing The Right Web Development Agency

All you need to do is google “website developer [designer] near me” and you will be overwhelmed with the results. First scroll through the paid ads and then the pages are endless. Endless lists of everyone that considers themselves to be the “Best in Town,” and “Award Winning,” web designer.

Your new web development agency can have all these accolades and all the great reviews. However, if they fail in several key areas none of that really matters. Often they are not fired due to their skill set or creative availability, but because of their people skills, customer service, and communication [or lack thereof]. 

Three Must Haves:

1. Ability to listen
2. Ability to understand and communicate your brand identity
3. Effectively communicate your brand through a visual medium and user experience.

How To Listen

Your new agency needs to know how to listen, not just hear. Listening is so much more than hearing. It’s having a deep understanding of your desires and how to interpret them through creative design. All this happens while maintaining the user experience of who you really are as a company. To do this they must completely understand your target audience. 

• Once you communicate to your web designer your goals and expectations ask them to repeat back to you what did you hear? 
• Does it line up? 
• They need to know how to tell “Your Story” and clearly communicate your brand!

Communication

• Do they and their team understand serving the customer, communication, setting clear expectations, and project scope? 
• Do they understand your goals and vision for the company, or do they have their own? 

While you hire them for their creative talent and you want them to have a reasonable amount of artistic freedom it is still very important that they understand who you are and what you do, who your target audience is, and what differentiates you from everyone else in your industry. 

Ask them questions that relate specifically to your business, the project, and its requirements. In doing this it forces the developer to think about your specific needs, this will cause them to come up with solutions and provide detailed responses to your questions. This is great and will show you that they not only take the project seriously but also fully understand the expectation and scope of work.

Red Flags

1. Answering your questions vaguely, and not providing detail on how they intend to overcome the challenges you highlight within the project.
2. Afraid to say, “I don’t know.” It is okay if they don’t know but do they finish the sentence with, “we will figure that out.”

Something Good

• Responsive to your questions
• They don’t ignore any difficult questions that you may have.
• Takes time to think and process. 
• Doesn’t always have an immediate solution. 

*This shows a thought process and that they are willing to brainstorm and consider your new ideas.

A True Partnership

The internet and the platforms that run on it are always changing. Whether it is WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, Wix, or any others, they are all changing rapidly as new technology and securities are created. Does the agency that you are looking at provides ongoing support for the website, do they offer packages for hosting and maintaining the website, plugin updates, backups, edits & changes to the content, and Search Engine Optimization? [look at our article “When To Do SEO?”] 

A website can rarely be developed, published, and considered complete. A website grows and changes as your business does. User Experience is more important than ever before. A recent survey or UX [User Experience] Trends finds that 81% Think Less of a Company if the website is not up to date. [survey conducted by Blue Fountain Media]

81% Think Less of a Company if the website is not up to date.

But it’s not as simple as switching up your content, posting to your blog, or publishing news articles. As your business grows, your customers will inevitably demand more from your website. Whether it’s in the form of increased functionality, additional pages, new content or continued optimization that caters to growing demand, it’s more than likely you’ll need to be pushing updates to the site fairly frequently.

Several options to maintain your web presence, and most often this is done in one of two ways:

1. The hiring of an in-house website administrator
2. A continuing relationship with the web development agency you hired

Of course, there are benefits and drawbacks to each method. Personally, I’d always recommend opting for the latter (where possible) — based on personal experience. After the initial completion of the project, nobody will know your website and business better than the folks that designed and built your website.

In the last several years through the pandemic consumers are researching, discovering, and shopping businesses online more than ever before. Record sales for all industries have been recorded due to people shopping at home and online. According to Blue Corona, studies indicate that up to 80% of people are researching a company online prior to making the decision to purchase or do business with them, especially in the case of small businesses. 

How are they finding these small businesses? It’s not the Yellow Pages any longer. What does this mean? That a solid website that tells your story, has a strong clear message, and branding that has had Search Engine Optimization from the very beginning is non-negotiable.