How To Hire A Web Designer
1. Who are we to be saying this?
Laika is owned by Andrew Hammer, an award-winning web designer who has
been designing web sites since 1994, when the most advanced web sites in the
world looked like this page. He was there at the beginning of the web, and has
been designing web sites ever since.
2. Getting started
The first step in finding a web designer is to find someone who knows how to do
the kind of site you want to do. That sounds easy, and it is, because web designers,
(particularly free-lancers and small mom-and-pop firms) desperately want your
business and will tell you that they can do anything you want. Your real task is to
verify that. Ask for previous examples or URLs of sites that are exactly like the one
you want. If they don't have one like that, or if they have not at least set up a project
for viewing that demonstrates that they can do that particular kind of site, your site
may well be their 'experiment'. That will cost you, in both time and money, because
you are paying for them to learn how to do the kind of site you want.
Be sure you're working with somebody who knows what they're doing when they
say they can do it.
3. What the web designer is supposed to do for you
The web designer is supposed to do five things when you hire them:
a) create a web site for you based upon your ideas and needs, as well as your
materials
b) arrange for the hosting of your site with a service provider or be given the
necessary information by you to work with your existing host
c) help you secure your domain name, if you do not already have one
d) explain all of the charges for the above to you in order to arrive at their price for
the site
e) work out a maintenance agreement that clearly specifies what both of you are
supposed to do in order to maintain your site
4. Making it easy on you and the web designer
We cannot say it enough or more loudly: have everything you know you want on
that site prepared and ready for the designer before they begin the job. (If you
really don't know what you want, just keep reading... we'll get to that.) Would you
hire a person to help you paint your house if you didn't have enough paint when
they got there and didn't know what colour you wanted? They have shown up, and
are on the clock. Their job is to work with your ideas and make them happen. You
are going to pay that person for coming out regardless of whether or not you are
ready. More important, you will pay that person again to come out to your house
when you finally are ready. Unless you are hiring a permanent employee, you
cannot do this and be happy at the same time.
You want your web site done quickly; so does the designer, who wants to finish
your site as soon as possible so they can move on to the next site. In the same way
that you cannot make a living from one sale, the designer cannot make a living
from your site, unless you are hiring them as an in-house web person. (Note: Most
web designers don't want to work for you in-house, because you can't afford their
salary. Thus the contract web designer is a more plentiful species than the inhouse web person.)
Having everything ready up front helps both of you; you save money that you will
otherwise spend on ongoing design sessions, and the designer can make money
by finishing your site quickly and moving on.
The biggest mistake that people make when contracting for a web site is thinking
that the web designer is a PR person for their business. That is not their job. They
do not know your business/organisation; they are not going to learn your business/
organisation; they are not going to sit down with you and plan your marketing
strategy. They already have a job, which is to build a web site for your business/
organisation based upon the information you supply them.
The sole job of the designer is to arrange and assemble the information that you
give them about your business/organisation. They can tell you what will work, and
what will not work, in order to successfully put your business/organisation on the
web. That is what they are good at, that is what they know how to do. You get the
maximum use of their time when you allow them to do that and only that.
5. So what does it mean to be ready?
Know what you want to say about yourself. Know how you want to present yourself,
and what you want to offer on the site. You had to do that when you set up your
business/organisation; you also have to do that in order to set up your business/
organisation on the internet.
In order for you to be happy with your web designer experience, you should be
able to provide all materials, logos, copy, photos, descriptive text in final form for
the site before the designer touches their computer. (Again, if you can't supply
these things, keep reading, we'll get to that.)
This is important because if the designer begins work with your unfinished
materials, you will find yourself in a situation where the designer has received your
deposit, has done all they can do with your site, has begun to put you out of their
mind because they need to eat, and has moved on to other sites.
Guess what? You have just accomplished two things. You have raised the cost to
complete your site, because the designer now has to 'return' to your project for
which you did not provide complete materials, and it will now take more time to put
their other projects aside and reacquaint themselves with your incomplete site. The
second thing you have done is delayed the existence of your web site, or had the
designer put up an incomplete site that 'exists', but does not function in the way you
wanted. At that point the designer has done their job based upon what you
supplied (or actually, did not supply), and you have made what should be a very
clear line between site creation and maintenance into a blurry (and expensive)
mess. Prepare for some unpleasantness if you go about things this way.
6. But what if I don't have all these materials?
If you do want the designer to create logos, take photos, and write copy for you, you
need to say this up front and understand that you will pay for those extra services.
(You want to pay for those services, because then you have an itemised assurance
that they will be done properly.) Many designers will be happy to help you with this,
but almost all prefer to work with supplied materials. An important caveat: if the
designer does not know how to price these services for you, you already know
what you need to know; they do not do those things regularly if at all, and you
would be unwise to pay them for those services. Why?
Consider this: the designer may take horrible photos, and not have a clue how to
write good copy. Again, their job is to know what works for the web and how to
prepare and assemble your content for the web, not necessarily to create that
content. They can tell you that putting five pages of text on your home page is a
very bad idea; they cannot write it for you unless they are a writer, and while they
may have such skills, they are not supposed to be a photographer or a writer.
Now, at Laika we are fortunate to have experience with all of these things; writing,
photos, animation, and multimedia. But the most important thing to remember
(especially for our non-corporate clients) is what you just read above: such things
do not get 'included' in the price of the site. They are professional services. For
example, the person who writes copy for us is a professional writer. So we can do it
for you, and we are happy to, but it will be much cheaper if you do it yourself.
Billable hours become big and ugly rather quickly if you don't have a corporate web
budget.
On the other hand, if you feel that your own words are good enough, then you don't
need a writer to edit your text. That gets back to you being in charge of what goes
into your site. There is nothing wrong with you writing your own text and supplying
your own photos, so long as you know that what you supply is what you will see on
the site.
We'll say it one more time: the designer constructs a web site based upon the ideas
and materials you supply, to give you the presence you want on the internet.
Designers do not decide what that presence is; we interpret and manifest it for you.
7. Maintenance
This is where most of the anguish and misery of dealing with a web designer
arises, largely because no one spells things out, and leaves all kinds of questions
unanswered. At the end of a site's creation, you are feeling happy because you
actually have this shiny new web site. The designer is feeling happy because they
have their shiny new money. And at some point both of you have agreed that
maintaining the site will be 'no problem'.
Listen carefully: it is a problem. Maintenance needs to be specified. There are an
infinite number of ways to agree to maintain a site, but you need to choose one and
have it agreed and discussed and printed out and signed by you and the designer.
Why? Because maintenance is work. Even if it is one hour per month, it is work,
and like anything else, labour costs money. Maintenance also needs to be spelled
out clearly because if you come to your designer six months after your site is
launched with a new logo, new look, new name, new photos, new products, and
new text... well... you have just asked for a new web site. Maintenance on a site
needs to be agreed by contract even more than does the site itself, for the sake and
sanity of both parties involved.
8. So why should you choose Laika?
Not because we have ten years of experience in a field of business that is ten years
old. Not because we have designed award-winning sites and sites for businesses/
organisations on four continents.
The most important reason for you to choose Laika is because we fix what other
people have screwed up. A great deal of our projects today are re-designs of sites
that people have had done without following any of the advice you have just read.
People have gone out and had web sites done by relatives, friends, amateurs, and
others who may or may not have had good intentions, but all of which didn't quite
deliver the goods the way that the client wanted them. Sites are either too simple,
don't work properly, or the client cannot get the maintenance they thought they paid
for. We deliver, and we make our obligations clear before the job begins.
Web sites are what we do. We are capable of doing what needs to be done with no
nonsense involved. But we are not going to offer you quickie web sites for $4.95
per month. Like everything else in life, you get what you pay for. Some people feel
that drinking water out of a paper cone is good enough for them. (And of course,
the paper cone is one method of getting liquid into your mouth, for about ten
minutes, at which point you will find yourself with a wet napkin in your hand.) Those
people are not our clients.
We have had clients leave us because they felt that our costs were higher than they
should be. But consider the following: One client did this, and ended up building a
new site that was much cheaper for them. It was a visual disaster, was buggy, and
was dysfunctional in what it was supposed to do. They have just recently come
back to us, after losing more money during their time away from us than they would
have spent had they stayed with us. If having your business/organisation online is
important to you, a good web design house is worth the money. That's why we're
here.
9. TRUE STORIES OF THE WEB
So when you have built the perfect web site and put it up on the internet, and we
have made sure that everything is working the way it should work, then there will
never be any more problems with anything on your site, right?
Wrong. The following stories are real stories of various problems with major
corporate web sites, when viewed using a broadband connection and a state of the
art computer..
• A furniture company with branches throughout the world offers different sites
customised for each country. Upon a visit to the site for the home country, the
browser froze, and then when it was relaunched, once a selection from a pull down
menu was chosen, the programme crashed. This happened repeatedly.
• A major high-end automobile company offered a pioneering web site with all
kinds of interactive tricks and features to customise the user's experience. Upon
loading the site, the graphics were thrown all over the page in such a way as to
make the whole site incoherent, and even when trying to choose some of the
features, those features took forever to load.
• Perhaps the funniest example of all... upon visiting the site of a major ISP (internet
service provider) offering broadband service across the United States, the site
came up totally blank, despite repeated refresh and reload attempts.
• On the web site of one of the world's major package delivery services, the button
provided for a user to track their shipment returned a 'page not found error'.
The one thing you always have to keep in mind about the internet is that like life,
there is no way to permanently avoid problems. When problems occur, the first
thing that many people do is go directly to the web designer and say, 'What is going
wrong with my site?! What have you done to my site?!' The answer is most likely
nothing.
Unlike the reassuring television message from years ago that 'the problem is not in
your receiver', the truth with the internet is that the problem could very well be in
your receiver, your browser, your ISP, or just the continuous massive traffic jam that
is the internet. As computer people who live behind Oz's curtain, we have had
things happen to us that baffle our own minds. The one thing that never solves
them is panic and shouting.
If you have a problem with your site, contact us. We will look at all the variables you
present to us and try to find out what is going on. But after we have completed work
on your site, there is a 99% chance that we are no more the cause of technical
problems than is your neighbour's dog. Sometimes the choices you make in regard
to the features on your site can cause problems for some viewers. In that event, that
possibility will already have been made known to you by us before we ever
implemented those features. And yes, clients choose features all the time that can
only be viewed by the best computers. If you have ever encountered a message
that 'this file requires a newer version of RealPlayer than currently exists on your
computer', you already know what we mean.
Another example of this is animation on a site. In most cases, your audience will
need plug-ins for their browser before being able to view full scale animated
features on your site. These plug-ins are free for download all over the internet, so
there is no excuse for a computer user not to get them. In the same way that one
cannot use the same tools on a 1966 Ford Galaxy that you need for a 2004 Saab
900, this is all about keeping up with technology and a base level of computer. No
computer made before 1996 can have a very meaningful web experience
anymore. So when your Aunt Gladys phones you in a panic because her 1989
Apple LC cannot see your web site, she is actually doing something similar to
attempting to phone Mongolia using a string and two cups. She will be lucky to see
any web site not written for Lynx (a prehistoric, text-only web browser from the time
before it was possible to view images on the internet.)
We strive for perfection in an imperfect world, and what we promise you is that we
will continue to strive. We do not own or control the internet; we just try to manage
what goes on in our small part of it. 99.9% of the time, we succeed.
©2004 Laika Web Exploration. May be reproduced with credit to the owner (Laika Web Exploration).