Web Design – 7 Key things to avoid

A search for “web design” on Google returns more than 325million results. So how do we start eliminating all these socalled designers? Here are a few of the most common shortcomings.

Watch out for:

1. Templates 2. Subdomains 3. DIY Hosting 4. High Renewal Costs5. Poor Coding 6. Inaccessible Design 7. Advertising / SelfPromotion

1. Templates

Watch out for designers offering you a choice of templates. Thisnot only means that they’re doing no new design work for theirfee but could also have an affect on your search engine ranking.If the search engine robots see the same layout, backgroundimages and styles over and over again they could penalise yoursite for being a copy of another site. Best avoided.

2. Subdomains

Watch out for design services offering you your own domain wherethe address still includes a reference to another company. Youshould have a domain in this form – www.yourcompany.com. Watchout for www.yourcompany.hostingcompany.com orwww.hostingcompany.com/yourcompany. These forms mean that theyare putting your site in a folder of their own site and itdoesn’t carry as much weight. It’s an easy way of them savingmoney and giving you a lesser sevice.

3. DIY Hosting

Watch out for anyone who does their own hosting. If their servergoes down it could mean that your site disappears. Servers canbe left on for long periods of time but do need to be restartedoccasionally. You don’t want your site going down – there couldbe someone in the middle of using it. If they claim to offerhosting find out if they outsource it to a professional company.This is much safer.

4. High Renewal Costs

Watch out for hidden costs. It’s quite common for designcompanies to offer you a full all singing all dancing site for agreat price only for you to find that it will cost you half ofthat again the following year. There are always ongoing costs toa website, hosting and domain name renewal. If there are noongoing costs quoted, monthly or annual, be wary.

5. Poor Coding

Watch out for poor coding. HTML, the language of web pages, isdeveloping and changing all the time. In fact, HTML is on itsway out to be replaced by an enhanced language called XHTML.Look at a page the designer has done or their own site. View thesource code and look at the section between the head tags (theword “head” in between angled brackets). Any mention of “style”or a “.css” file is a good sign. Now look at the section betweenthe body tags. If you see lots of tags in angled brackets like”font” or “td” then the page coding is showing its age.

6. Inaccessible Design

Watch out for inaccessible design. This is very similar to thelast point. It’s important that your site can be used not onlyby PC users but also by the visually impaired, people usingpalmtops, PDAs and mobile devices. You can’t afford to reduceyour audience by having an inaccessible design.

7. Advertising / Self Promotion

Watch out for the design company using your website as a meansof marketing themselves. Whilst having a discreet link to theircompany site at the foot of the page is quite fair andreasonable, be wary of any additional links or advertising. Theycould be making money selling advertising space which you’repaying for.

About the author:Chris Smith works as a web designer, developer and internetmarketing consultant. For further information on high quality,good value web design please visit his site – Professional WebDesign