Guest author: Sean R Mize
What to Look For in a Web Designer
What to Look For in a Web Designer By Sean R Mize
The most important quality to look for in a coder is experience. This is true of almost any job, yes, but it holds especially true for any job that involves producing goods, rather than simply providing services--and websites are actual goods. And as valuable as experience is for, say, a carpenter, the value of experience is at least doubled for programmers--if a carpenter builds a bookcase incorrectly, the potential damage is limited to your books falling over, while if your website coder builds the website incorrectly, you stand to lose massive business, compromise the security of your commerce system, or even exposure your web server--and thousands of computers besides--to nasty viruses or worse. If you look for a coder based on credentials alone--a degree from a design institute, for example, or a certification course--then you ensure that you have someone who at least knows about all the concepts that website design and coding requires--but you can't be sure that your coder will know what to do in a real-world situation, where things can and do go wrong as often as possible. So if at all possible, get someone who's done HTML work before and save yourself some problems down the road.
It's also important to choose your coder based on the kind of experience they have. You don't necessarily have to choose a coder who's done direct response site work before--if you followed our instructions in chapter three, your site map should be good enough to communicate to your coder exactly what your site needs to maximize your conversion rate--but it can be helpful, especially if your coder has resolved some direct response site problems before and can help your site avoid similar problems. What you do need is a coder with substantial HTML experience, especially experience with sites that involve integrated commerce systems. Buyers will forgive a few lapses in the composition of your page, but lapses in your commerce system interfere with the simplicity of the buying process, potentially compromise buyer security (and the security of your own accounts), and give your site an extremely bad name--and thus a low conversion rate.
Depending on how you've designed your site and site map, you may want to hire a coder based on CSS, Flash, or Java experience as well. If your site design calls for effects that only these types of coding can provide (see the previous chapter for a quick discussion of what CSS can do that HTML can't), you'll certainly want a coder who can bring those skills to your project. Even if your site doesn't explicitly call for these skills, consider hiring a designer with experience in this area anyway--you don't know how you might choose to revise your page in the future, and if you do decide to incorporate some advanced styling or effects in a later iteration of your page, you'll want to use the same coder in order to ensure a greater familiarity with the material and an idea about the specific problems that may arise from implementing more complicated layers of coding.
What's more, a good CSS/Flash/Java coder can suggest ideas for improving your website that you may not yourself have thought of. For example, you might be using a proprietary commerce system in order to handle your online orders--until you meet a coder who can create a more secure, easier-to-use commerce system with no service charges and that goes with your overall site design. A good CSS coder can also overhaul the look of your page with comparatively little effort, bringing in more paying customers and usually giving them a better experience of your page.
Whatever qualifications your coder has, it's always a good idea to check out all of the sites they've worked on, as well as any HTML examples they include in their portfolio. Take a look at the kind of work your prospective coder does: are there any special layout tricks that they tend to use over and over? Any stylistic choices that you just don't like? Does the site work well, or is it confusing to navigate or use?
Don't overthink this part of the hiring process: if you navigate your potential coder's portfolio on instinct, you can get a closer approximation of how your eventual customers will use sites designed by that coder. And unless the site is simply a mess (either functionally, stylistically, or in terms of navigation), don't necessarily take the coder out of consideration: what you might perceive to be a personal lack of taste or foresight could easily be a result of bad decisions taken on the part of this coder's former clients. As long as you're providing the basic site map and stylistic ideas--and as long as the coder obviously knows what he or she is doing on some level--you can avoid the pitfalls your competitors might have made and ensure that your site will be successful and striking.
Although it's often overlooked, there's one factor you should take into account when choosing a coder: his or her personality. This isn't as much of a consideration for a short-term website project (like the average direct response website)--but depending on your business plan, a coder with a good personality can be an asset in the long run. As we'll talk about in a later chapter, you're likely at some point to want to do some revision on your site--whether to add new products, resolve some functionality issues, or just to give the site a nice graphical overhaul. And it's far easier to make these kinds of changes if you know and trust your coder already--easier on you, since you don't have to go to the trouble of searching out and hiring a new coder, and easier on the coder, since they already know your basic business plan, site needs, and preferences--and they also know their own code well enough to start working on your revisions immediately without having to spend a great deal of time familiarizing themselves with someone else's work.
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Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.
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