When you want to start a web project, the first decision is to decide which web design agency you want to hire to do it. It seems like a simple choice, but it’s not. We offer you here a checklist to help you in the choice:
Web design is not enough
The first and most important point is not to choose a web design agency, it seems like a contradictory statement, but it is not. If you want your web project to work, you need to choose a web agency that is a web design agency and, at the same time, is a digital marketing agency or, at least, is an SEO agency.
Many companies offer web design, but in any web project, web design is simply part of the process and is often less important than the online marketing part of the project. There are many agencies that can offer web design but do not cover the digital marketing aspects, choosing this option will lead you directly to failure as you may end up with a beautiful and functional website that will not be able to be positioned in search engines afterwards.
Therefore, you need to choose a web design agency that is also a digital marketing agency, leaving out options like advertising agencies and graphic design agencies.
A web agency in your city
We recommend that you choose a web design agency near you whenever possible. While it is true that most work can be done remotely and via video conferencing, it is also true that design presentations are always best done in person.
The reason is simple to answer, when we present a graphic proposal or a web page design, we are guided mainly by the client’s comments but also by his non-verbal communication, a certain gesture tells us if we have succeeded or not and, these gestures, they are very difficult to capture via a video call, so if your company is from Barcelona, we recommend you choose a web design agency from Barcelona.
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A web project is a team task
It is crucial that you always opt for agencies and not for freelancers. There are freelancers with high professional training and well prepared to perform specialized work, however, creating a website is a team effort in which you need at least :
A project manager who organizes the project and helps implement the business logic.
An SEO consultant who proposed and implemented the SEO strategy of the project at its start and the overall digital marketing strategy of the project.
A web designer who captures the client’s idea and knows how to capture it graphically and in connection with the other actors.
A web programmer who creates the backoffice and the necessary functionalities at the back-end.
A web designer or front-end that converts the graphic design into a web page and implements the necessary usability and navigation features.
Perhaps even a content generator and editor. These differentiated roles can only be offered by web design companies that have large and specialized teams.
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Two web designers are better than one
Hire a web design agency that has at least two web designers on staff. It is true that a good web designer must be able to offer various registers at the design level, however it is impossible for him to be good at all of them.
There are web designers who are very good with very corporate designs while other designers tend to stand out more in more innovative or disruptive designs. This has nothing to do with proposing a web design for a metal company than for an online youth cosmetics store.
Any self-respecting web agency should have both resources to choose the best designer profile for your project.
Advertising agencies do not make web pages, they outsource them
In accordance with the last point, it is very important that the company that is going to execute the web project performs all these tasks in-house, i.e. does not outsource them. Outsourcing tasks is usually more expensive and has a cost in terms of time and quality of execution. It’s simple, an outsider will hardly be able to participate in the whole project, they will have other priorities to fulfill and will not be available all the time.
Let’s assume that the client hires an advertising agency or a graphic design agency to realize his web project. The process will be more or less as follows:
The advertising agency will meet with the client and get the project requirements, then transfer them to their design team who will make the graphic proposal.
It is at this point that the advertising agency will look for a programming or web design company that will do the programming of the design imagined by the advertising agency, a design that will probably not have taken into account my SEO or online communication criteria.
When you have already programmed the design, here there are two options: either you tell the client that the work is already done and a spectacular website has been left and the end of the project, or…
That you hire a digital marketing agency to do the SEO and probably SEM promotion of the website.
Obviously, at each phase jump there will be dysfunctions since the project was carried out in a strictly sequential way and each actor entered the process in his action phase without having participated in the rest of the phases in a decisive way. It is also important to keep in mind that each actor represents an additional cost that the final client will end up paying. It is estimated that a project carried out by an advertising agency generally costs double or triple the cost of the same project carried out by a single web agency.
Experience is a diploma
Generally, when hiring a web design agency, there is one point that is not sufficiently taken into consideration: experience.
When we talk about experience, we are not referring to the years of life of the company, we are referring to the knowledge accumulated by its team. To create a good web project you need to have done a lot before, to know what works and especially what doesn’t and this is only given by the hours of work and previous experiences.
This point is particularly important when trying to implement the business logic of the web project, this is where a high degree of knowledge and experience is needed.
Everything has a price and needs a time of execution
As we have explained to you, the creation of a web project goes through different phases in which various actors participate. The obvious consequence is that any web project takes time and has a cost that must be taken into account.
To make a well thought out and created web page in a short time and in an economical way is a fallacy. The development of a web project for any business is very important, it can become the main or one of the main sources of business generation for your company and you should not spare resources, time or money.
We are used to second chances, very often we end up working with clients who initially asked us for a quote and opted for cheaper options, by companies that offered not only web design services and not SEO or directly by freelancers. In the end, the client ended up paying for two websites, one that ended up in the trash and another that is the one they will finally work with.
Conclusion
Choosing a web agency is not easy, it is important that you choose an experienced agency that offers both web design and SEO or web positioning services, that is close to you and that has a multidisciplinary team that handles the whole process without outsourcing any part of it.
