7 Ways to Ensure Satisfaction With Your Website

A professional web designer will be up to date on current design trends, and will know how to properly script your site with web standards compliant code.

  1. Hire a professional web site designer who knows what they are doing and has proven themselves in the field.
    A professional web designer will be up to date on current design trends, and will know how to properly script your site with web standards compliant code.
  2. Make sure the web developer you choose uses web standards compliant code.
    This includes using XHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). There are many benefits of utilizing Web Standards in your code, including accessibility and search engine friendly code. Web Standards Code makes your site future proof. A great way to check up on your web developer is to test a few pages of their site with the W3C Validator (http://www.w3c.org), although, just because a site doesn’t validate does not mean you’ve found a bad developer.
  3. Listen to suggestions made by your web designer and, when possible, implement them.
    Most web designers recommend things for your site for a reason. It is rare that they are just trying to get more money out of you. If they suggest you add a blog or news area to your site, and keep it updated, it is because they know you will see better results in search engines in the long run than if you were to have a site that never updates. On the other hand, if you don’t trust your web designer and they recommend something you think your site probably doesn’t need, ask for objective opinions on a public forum.
  4. Trust your web designer.
    If you have taken the proper steps to ensure your web designer is a true professional, and you have properly described your goals and strategy, your designer will have more knowledge of what your design should look like than you will. They are up on current trends, and as long as they implement your company identity, your personal tastes should not matter. You will be much happier in the long run if you give a professional web designer the freedom to design your site to adhere to today’s standards and trends. They will be able to design to appeal to your target audience, which is much more important than designing to appeal to you (after all, that is what you are paying them for – to sell your product). Not that you should completely settle. Most professional designers will provide you with an agreed upon amount of concepts for you to choose from.
  5. If your site is not popular right away, invest more money and time in advertisement, not redesign.
    Just because you build a web site, it doesn’t mean that you will instantly have customers. A lot of time and money goes into advertising your site. Chances are, if you aren’t getting hits or sales, it isn’t because of the look of your site, but because a proper strategy wasn’t implemented to receive the highest possible amount of visitors. Most of the cost from a web site usually goes into advertisement campaigns.
  6. Don’t give up on offline advertising.
    So many people think that once they have a web site, they don’t need anything else – your site isn’t the Field of Dreams. In all actuality, unless your site is a self-supported site (ex: an ebay shop or other internet exclusive web store) if you stop advertising offline you may as well shut down your site as well. Web sites cannot support your entire client base, and in most cases web sites rely on offline advertisement to draw customers (the purpose of most web sites is to provide more information about your business and complement offline advertisements). Put your site address on Business Cards, Brochures, Direct Mailers, in your Yellow Pages, etc. You will see much better results.
  7. Become informed.
    Read information to prepare yourself for the design process and your relationship with your designer. You are already taking a step forward by having read this post.
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