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Unlike doctors or lawyers, web designers can be anyone. In fact, if you are budget constrained but need to build a basic site for your business, you may consider asking students to design for you.
But if you are looking for a professional web designer, we provide some unbiased tips and guidelines here. To build a professional website, we may need to look at different aspects of web design:
Clear understanding of site visitor behavior
It is said that if a new visitor comes to your site and not knowing what your site is all about in 4 seconds, your designer has failed you. Thousands of websites are built every day. Nobody will care about your site if "you don’t address their needs and solve their problems fast". Take a look at Google website: "you go in, without having a proper look at the listing, you are out in seconds." Yet, they are one of the most influential internet giants today. An experienced web designer will NOT recommend you to "Design a flash intro page so that visitors will find it annoying and close the window". Using design elements that can get into the way of a customer intending to buy something is an unforgivable sin.
Technical knowledge of how search engines rank pages
Fundamentally, we are building a website for visitors. Your web designer may be using cutting edge design technology (Eg. Flash, dhtml, Javascript etc), but your site is still going to sit there if search engines ignore you. Ask any experienced internet marketer and he will tell you web design and internet marketing are closely wired. Sites that are built with "Correct HTML" and "clear hierarchy" often receive higher Google ranking. (Google says)
Awareness of web standards, usability and validation services
Why not fire your web designer immediately if he/she is not aware of the World Wide Web consortium? For information, they are the ones who develop web standards, technology and direct the formulation of web policies. By using correct web standard, it means that your website can be cross platform, more user friendly and normally load faster. You may want to validate your current website at W3C Markup Validation Service.
Aesthetic aspect of websites
After all, another reason why visitors come to your site is they want to be entertained. If your site is not appealing, nobody is going to be happy. For quite a while, company CEOs and managers want their sites to look flashy and splashy. But now everyone realize that at the end of the day, we build websites to generate profit or cut down expenses. Those flashy elements can only slow down your loading time and gets in the way of potential customers.
To understand more about our web site design solution, feel free to visit www.singaporewebdesigner.com/webdesign/index.php
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