Looking for a web designer may be a daunting task for the small business owner.  This web designer will be the one that will be showcasing your business and personal reputation online for everyone in the world to see.

You want to make sure you get a professional designer but at a fair and reasonable price, while meeting the expectations and requirements you may have.

Obtain at least three to six potential web design firms.

• This can be accomplished by asking friends, relatives  or other small business peers for references.
• Or find your favorite local establishments and look at the bottom of their website, generally the web designer will sign their “website by XXX” and provide a link.
• And finally you would do a Google or Bing search for web designers (Presumably in the surrounding area).

Once you get around 5-6 web firms that may work we need to narrow this done to the three best reputable firms.  We can accomplish this by performing some tasks (aka background check) on them.

Spend time on their website

• Go to their website and spend some time on it. It should be a great site and flow nicely.
• Tip: Check the bottom of the web designers site, if it has any of these keywords like “proudly powered by WordPress“, or by “powered by Wix” or “powered by Joomla” or by any other 3rd party website vendor; make sure to keep in mind they are not web designers. But they have merely paid another product to produce the website for them and are probably not the most experienced web designer to assure your needs and online presence is going to be met.

Read any Google reviews they may have online

• Perform a generic search on Google search engine using their business name and look for reviews they may have.
• Generally a Google Business Place Info Block should show up promptly and display the Google reviews. So for Northwoods Web Designs, you would search “Northwoods Web Designs” and you would see we have multiple 5 star Google reviews from our wonderful clients.
• 

Review the portfolio page on their website

• • Do you like their designs?
  • Are the web designs different from each other  or are they cookie cutter designs like the rest?
  • If they either have no portfolio page or no website, make sure to remove them from your list of web designer options.

After completing these tasks, you should have narrowed down your options to around three.  Next step is to setup a calls and make sure to ask these questions for the potential web designer.

Have you found other tips to obtain a great web designer? If so please let us know below.