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Whether you are building a brand new website for your business, or you are looking to update your existing website, hiring the right web designer can quickly become an overwhelming process. There are literally thousands of web design firms and freelance web designers out there boasting to be the best. How can you tell what makes one designer better than another? How can you tell which designer will truly give you exactly what you need? The first rule in deciding which design firm to hire is that experience means almost everything in the design industry. Talented web designers are not great designers because they were taught how to design in school, they have become great designers over a long period of time, gaining experience and learning through their own failures and successes. Web and graphic design are a lot like painting a picture. An artist can be taught the basic rules and fundamentals of painting, but true talent just cannot be taught in a classroom. When you go looking for a design firm to build your website, look for a design firm with many years of experience and hundreds of clients to speak for them. Experienced web designers are known for their ability to create custom web designs for every single client. No two websites they build are alike. Younger designers tend to stick to one type of design trend and play it out over and over again for several clients. The designs may look different, but the general build and layout are the same. Their designs tend to look more like templates than custom web designs. The importance of having a custom web design for your website is absolutely crucial. The look and feel of your website design may be the only thing that allows the general public to see the difference between the services your company offers compared to your competitor’s services. A custom web design will give your company that online edge that you need to attract twice the amount of customers in half the time. Whether you choose to hire a larger design firm or a freelance designer to build your website, always ask to see their portfolio. The only thing about a web designer that is more important than experience is the contents of their portfolio. Do not be so concerned about whether the portfolio contains live sites that currently exist on the web today. Look for diversity in the examples shown in the portfolio. An experienced designer will have a wide range of designs built for a large variety of clients. The more diverse their client-base is, the more you can trust they will know what to do with your company’s website. Try not to judge a designer by the look of their own business website. While it is important for their website to look professional and be user-friendly, it doesn’t have to be the greatest looking website you have ever seen. Professional designers do not get paid to work on their own websites, so most of them will keep it as simple and clean as possible while they spend most of their design energy and skills on their clients’ websites instead. An experienced web designer will come equipped with a variety of knowledge and skills, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, PHP, Flash, Ajax and SEO. It is not necessary for one designer to know all of these skills, but the more they know the better. It is better to be able to hire one person or company to do all of these things, rather than hire a lot of different people or companies to do one or two of these things. In this case it might be a plus to hire a larger design firm. A design firm has the money and resources to sub-contract all the work they don’t know how to do to someone else so you don’t have to. They know their own weaknesses and figured out a way to work around them for your convenience.
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