Choosing a web designer is not always easy, especially if you don't have detailed knowledge of how the World Wide Web works.

Budget & Pricing

Try to work out what your website budget is, comparing it to other spend such as having brochures printed or advertising in magazines. Remember that your site is constantly available, but that unless it has some uniquely interesting information (if only your location for local services) it may not have as many visitors as you might think.

There will always be someone who does web sites as a hobby with Frontpage, who will create a basic site for free. While this might suit some, often sites work better if constructed by someone with experience of the web. There are many subtle, but important, things that a good designer will take into account, such as how the site looks in different web browsers.

Look at Portfolios

A website designer’s portfolio is a good indicator of their experience and style. Have a look at the sites that they have been involved in, and see whether they look good and are easy to navigate.

Some web companies also include information about their people. Have a look for a CV of the designer, their background and experience might be useful to know about.

Check their Internet Reputation

Do a Google on the company’s name, to see if anyone has any positive or negative comments about them.

Another site of potential use is Blagger.com, where people post comments about companies that have failed to provide the services expected.

Web Design Association Memberships and Awards

Ignore any membership of the UKWDA, as it is both free and easy to join this association.

Also ignore the various web design awards that used to be popular. The awards are given out very freely to almost anyone who applies!

Quality Checks

Have a look at the content of the designer’s own site. Does it read well, do they make speling mistakes, how about grammar and punctuation?

If you are technically-minded you can use validation services to check that the site’s source code is reasonably valid, so that it will display as intended in standards-compliant web browsers. It’s easy to view the page source code in your web browser, so you can see whether it looks neat and easy-to-maintain, or whether it’s a rather verbose mess (as output by some cheaper web-creation software).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

A company or person who says that they can guarantee to get your site listed high in search engine results (such as Google) is either lying, doesn’t know what they’re doing, or works for Google.

A search engine’s job is to return results listed in order of relevance to the person doing the searching. They can only guess what is most relevant, but their algorithms and databases are constantly being improved to make results more useful to humans. So the best SEO you can do is to have a site that has useful and popular content.

There are usually “hacks” that artificially skew search engine results, but these are usually discovered by the search engines and the sites that use them marked down accordingly. So including lots of keywords in very small text, or adding text that has the same colour as the background, is usually counter-productive.

Some “rules of thumb” that seem to make sense are:

• Have a good overview description of your site and its contents on the home page. Make it a useful summary for new visitors.
• Keep your site up-to-date, with new additions when you can. A site that is out-of-date doesn't impress anyone.
• Include sensible meta tags in the page HTML, with a site description and a selection of keywords.
• Don’t use any SEO hacks, they might work for a bit, but then you’ll drop down the listings like a stone.
• Make your site easy for the search engines to index by using standards-compliant HTML.

You can also read up on what Google have to say on SEO.