Guide to Finding a Local Web Designer in Your City

If you want your business to stand out online, then you will need an impactful and functional website. When you are looking for a web designer, always check their skills and experience, along with their portfolio and customer reviews. We look at what you need to know and what questions to ask when you’re trying to find a local web designer in your city.

What should you look for when hiring a website designer?

Your website is a powerful marketing tool and an extension of your business, so it needs to work hard for you. It’s your opportunity to showcase your brand, your values, and your mission, so it needs to personify who you are and what you do. As your shop window, you want your visitors to stop, scroll, and fill in an enquiry form or contact you.

When you are researching a local web designer, check their skills, experience, portfolio, and customer reviews. Ask the designer how they develop their websites – are they custom-built or do they use templates? Bespoke coded websites tend to be much higher in price but are more likely to truly represent you.

Helping you choose a website

A good web designer will help you to decide on the type of website you need. Websites are usually supported by a ‘content management system’ (CMS) and one of the most common is WordPress. This is a popular CMS because it uses open-source code, which means it’s relatively easy to manage. WordPress websites are scalable, highly customisable (if you want to refresh your design a few years down the line) and very SEO-friendly.

If you sell products or digital items, you will need an ecommerce website. These websites need an extra level of security as they contain shopping carts. Your web designer will need experience with ecommerce systems like Woocommerce (for Wordpress) or Shopify.

Translate your website design ideas

Your website needs to make an impact on your visitors. It should be a site that makes you proud to share with your potential customers. Your web designer needs to be able to take your creative ideas and translate them into a site that promotes your products or services effectively. Although your website needs to be visually impactful, it also needs to function.

Consider your visitors’ experience. As an example, we designed a website for No Fluff Communications, where there was the challenge of many moving parts. This site had multiple layers across different sections. There were animations that needed adjusting. We had to balance all of the moving parts to keep visitors engaged without putting them off.

Skills to fix website issues

Before you choose a web designer, make sure they have the right skills and experience to fix a wide range of website issues. There’s nothing worse than someone building you a brand-new website, only to discover bugs, glitches, and broken layouts.

When we designed a website for Love Management Accounts, for example, there was the hurdle of fixing gradient borders! This might sound a bit technical and not a big problem, but small issues like this can lead to a broken layout and bugs. Nobody wants a glitchy website!

Use a website designer who offers hosting

Fast and secure website hosting is crucial if you want to improve performance, user experience, and search engine visibility. As technology evolves, you will want your website to stay functional. It’s not just about having an attractive website, it needs to work well too.

As your business grows, flexible web hosting enables you to increase server capacity whenever it’s needed. By choosing a web designer who offers hosting packages, you will have more options to make your site speedier and more secure. When you use a web designer to manage your hosting, they will handle all the technical details for you.