Getting a new business website live or overhauling an already existing one begs a serious question – how does one choose the best website design agency?
After all, a robust, responsive and easily navigable website not only complements the brand but is also crucial for any business aiming for more leads and conversions. In short, the website must embrace SEO well.

Ending up with the best web design agency by some effort and luck can be revolutionary to your marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can find the best web agency with certainty, that’ll get the job done accurately for your business website.

Create a detailed search oriented content that effectively addresses target audience’s queries

Before commencing your website design agency search, it is imperative you have an unambiguous idea of your website’s type (static, e-commerce, CMS, custom web services, blog etc.), functionality and features that’ll help achieve your business goals. Eventually, your website is not just a design exhibition, it’s a business tool first & foremost.

You must be ready with a professional business logo, comprehensive web page content, navigation menu and product descriptions along with their pictures (vital for an e-commerce website).

Of the many functionalities, you can expect the following from your website:

In order to achieve the above expectations, the website must provide easy navigation for its users, e-commerce functionality, SEO & conversion-optimized content, and security of website access through SSL and HTTPS protocols, among its other features.

Keeping ready at hand a list of business needs & goals, timeline and budget will help both you and the web design agency to ensure the website gets fine-tuned precisely.

Now, we move on to the aspects you must consider before finalizing a website design agency.

1. 1. 1. Extensively research the web design agencies online

         Begin by searching online for website design companies. You must look for these 3 vital characteristics in a great website design agency.

         • Is the web design agency newly established or they’ve been around a while? Find out if they have adequate experience in developing result yielding websites in your industry.
           Check if they’d provide support for the website when it goes live, and whether their in-house marketing services (if they provide) can aid in growing your business. That way, you could land a better deal.Assess the skills and capabilities of the agency through their portfolio of websites which will give you insights about their industry expertise, creativity scope, and adeptness at complex coding.
           Observe if those websites are responsive, implementing latest web design paradigms and if they have won awards.
           Obviously, it is unwise to assess just by the websites’ looks; pretty websites that aren’t user friendly & industry-aligned will never be at par with a decent, relevant and easily navigable website.
         • What is the average customer size the agencies work with? If you are the smallest/biggest customer they are dealing with, they will lack the requisite scale & level of experience to live up to the task. That’ll be a precarious situation for both parties.
         • Check out their socials to get a look and feel of what it will be like working with them. Do they fetch lot of smileys in their IG feed? Are they open in showcasing their expertise and talent? What about their interaction with the local community? Be thorough with this aspect.

         

      2. Go through every prospective web design agency’s own website

         After you have agreed upon a tentative list of prospective web design companies, check out their own respective business websites.
         If an agency’s website looks cave era, abstruse to navigate, out of alignment with their business goals, and/or doesn’t implement latest web design best practices, you can scratch that agency from your list.

         Visuals have tremendous potential to create an engaged user base. You want to check their site’s TTL (time to load), high-res images, videos etc. to see how much the agency understands the impact of visual content.

         Through their previous clients’ testimonials, access those clients’ sites to see their current state for gaining insights with respect to your own website’s future. You may contact those clients and ask for their experiences. Nothing beats hearing the truth from the horse’s mouth!
         

      3. Check the reviews of each web design agency

         Next step is checking what the review websites are saying about the web design agency you are pondering over after all the work you’ve done so far.

         A website design company’s professionalism, culture & reliability can be easily gauged from ratings/likes/dislikes on sites like Google, Yelp, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

         While checking on Google, you can go through the ‘Reviews’ to see what others say about the agency. Similarly, check the agency’s star rating at its Facebook business page.

         By now, your list of agencies would’ve shortened to include only the best web design agency options for designing your business website.
         

      4. Directly reach out to the shortlisted website design companies

         Reach out to the shortlisted agencies individually and ask them questions pertaining to how the efforts of both parties could coalesce to create an outstanding website for your business.

         Website design companies often follow a ‘ground up’ approach in web designing. Regardless of the approach taken, a top web development agency should ask you as many questions as needed for clarifications about your expectations, business goals, budget, timeline etc.

         More importantly, good agencies will reply politely & professionally to all your questions. They’ll either avoid using jargons altogether or provide detailed explanation whenever it can’t be avoided. Bottlenecks will be resolved patiently.

         They will ask pertinent questions to you, explain unfamiliar technical perspectives perspicuously, and also provide detailed solutions to issues you’d bring up vis-à-vis your website’s design, functionality, features and maintenance.
         In short, a great web design agency will keep you constantly in the loop sans any doubts or apprehensions. Both parties would eventually have utmost clarity of each other’s expectations before arriving at a mutually agreed decision.
         

      5. Ask these questions to the web design agency

         • Of course, your website will have content and the ultimate aim of content is to generate leads and conversions. This is where SEO comes into picture. If you do not have an in-house SEO expertise, enquire if the agency has it. Prefer an agency that does have SEO expertise for it will be crucial in developing the website fit enough to get recognized by search engines like Google.
         • How do you power your client’s website? Do you use a CMS (content management system)? The expected answer is yes.
         • You’d prefer an agency that is experienced in your industry. This is crucial when your industry is healthcare, legal or e-commerce (because of the compliancy rules like HIPAA and ADA, security & an ocean of strict guidelines). Ask the agency if they have prior experience with all that.
         • Enquire if a meeting could be fixed with the web design team of the agency. After all, you need to know who you’d be really working with on a day to day basis for many weeks. If the agency refuses, move on to the next agency.
         • Ask the agency if they’d provide advices/recommendations on best practices during the website development so as to reap the most out of it when it goes live. Sometimes agencies focus more on design and lose track of the actual goal: leads and conversion
         • After your website goes live, it would undergo regular updation. Will the agency provide you with training for that? You’d do well to learn the basics of adding/removing a user, content editing, form creation, troubleshooting and any other basic activity that you’ll need to do on your website on a daily basis.
         • Do talk about website ownership, content ownership, pricing/budget and the procedure to move the website to another hosting agency if needed. Take nothing for granted in this regard and clarify everything.

         

After everything has worked out to your complete satisfaction so far, you may take the final call on taking things ahead with the website design agency you’ve chosen and draft a contract to that effect.

Datawave, the Hong Kong web design company, has a highly competent web design team that understands that at the very core of website design lies the correct balance between design and performance, according brand positioning & website functionality the topmost priority.

To know more about how our experts are creating & keeping business websites running smoothly 24×7 round the year amid a plethora of devices, browsers, screen resolutions and orientations all over the world, feel free to reach out to us for a quick chat.