How to choose a web design and hosting company
Today there are thousands and thousands of companies offering web design solutions, but how do you know which company would be best for your requirements?
This article is in no way intended to be a technical document, but I will attempt to give you some guidelines in choosing a solution provider. This article is not intended for IT professionals, but rather for the layman wanting a new web solution but not knowing where to start.
Visibility
The first and most important factor is the visibility of your site.
What good is having the most amazing design and even tons of functionality if nobody ever finds your web site?
Most IT professionals today are able to develop a web site and even if you are not an IT professional, there are tools that make designing your own site fairly easy. What you want is somebody who can not only design your site, but also promote it for you.
The most useful and cheapest (it's free!!) method of promoting your site is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is all about getting your site listed on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. If you do a search on almost any topic on one of these large search engines, you generally get thousands or millions of results on the same topic. What does it help if your website is listed as result number 3 million when someone searches for something related to your website? Nobody is going to page through that many results. Your aim should be to have your site appear on the first 2 pages.
SEO is a complex topic, but here is a quick way for you to get started:
Google is the number 1 search engine on the Internet, so if your site lists well on Google, chances are you'll do okay on the other search engines as well.
So, install the google toolbar in your web browser. It's freely available from google. Then visit a prospective web design company's website and have a look at their Google PR (Page Rank). The PR is displayed in the middle of the Google Toolbar and is a value from 0 to 10. The higher the PR, the better that website will perform on Google searches. If a company claims that they can get you a good rating on the search engines, then their own site should be optimised as well! Ask the company what keywords they used to optimize their site, then do a search on a couple of the major search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista etc). Anybody offering SEO should be able to get their own page on the first page or at the worst, the second page.
Furthermore, you could visit some of their clients' sites and have a look at those sites' PR. After all, you are deciding whether you want to be a client of this company.
Speed
In South Africa most of us do not have the luxury of high-speed Internet connections, so speed is always a consideration for me. What's the use of having this amazing animation or Flash presentation if nobody is going to stick around to look at it or the rest of your website?
Again, I suggest you have a look at the prospective company's own website as well as their existing clients' sites and decide whether you like what you see. If you are irritated by the speed of the site or the design for that matter, chances are others will be irritated by your site for the same reasons. I helped someone with their website today and found the company who had design the site for them, had used 2 BMP images on the homepage, the one's size was 327KB and the other 265KB. As a result, their homepage was taking a fair amount of time to load for such a simplistic site. I converted the images to JPG at 34KB and 29KB each and asked her if she could see any difference in the quality of the images, which she couldn't. I was shocked to find that any web design company would use a BMP on a webpage, but yes - things like that could cost you dearly in the performance of the site.
Total solution
This is probably not a crucial factor, but it simply depends on how much effort you want to go through yourself. The fact is, it is often easier to deal with someone who can both design your site and host it as well. More importantly, think of the functionality that you want on your site at the end of the day. Maybe you want to start with a simplistic web site that will just "get you on the web" to get started. But in the long run you may envisage having a completely automated E-commerce site with credit card payment and shopping cart functionality. Often it is tempting to go for the smaller companies or individuals who are cheaper than the larger IT companies, but if that small company or individual is going to get stuck as soon as you ask them to do something they haven't done before, it may very well end up costing you more to ask a larger company to take over the project. I am all for using smaller companies and individuals IF they know what they're doing. Just make sure you have thought through what you want to achieve eventually and ensure the company you choose will be able to provide that solution.
Those are just some starting thoughts on hosting solutions. When time allows, I will write a bit more on functionality and content.
