Choosing a website designer can be tough. Owners of small to medium sized businesses who have need of a website don't always know how to pick the best person or group to design it for them. How do you know what you're getting? How do you know you aren't going to get a "cookiecutter" one site fits all type of website? How do you know that the dollars you spend on a website design are going to be spent wisely?
There are a few critical areas that you can use to judge whether the person you're choosing to design and code your site is a person qualified to give you the most value for your dollar.
The skeleton which supports your website is the code that runs it. That's the first area of qualification your website designer must satisfy. Secondly, does the designer build sites that are not only attractive, but also load quickly, even on a dialup connection, and are easy to navigate? That's the second area of qualification. Is the site text and code optimized so that the search engines can index and rank your site effectively? That's the third area of qualification. Is the site accessible to all browsers, devices, and operating systems, and does it look good on different size screens with different resolutions? Has the designer paid attention to accessibility issues? Accessibility is the last area.
But you don't know code from cowpatties, you say. How do you know whether a website designer you are considering hiring knows how to code properly? If he or she has a portfolio of sites which you can look at, you can use both the html and css validation tools at http://w3.org, linked from the list on the left side of their homepage. The W3C is the organization that writes the standard for all code that website designers should follow. Those who don't follow coding standards might be very surprised when the next big browser update occurs. The W3 tools are easy to use if you've ever filled out a simple web form. If you see a lot of errors when you submit an URL from a prospective web designer's portfolio, you'd best keep looking for another designer. If there are no errors, or only one or two errors related to css3 specification used in a css2 document (and probably intentional,) you're looking at decent code. If a site has a lot of coding errors you don't have to know what the errors mean, you just have to know they're there.
Looking through those same portfolio sites can also tell you a lot more about the designer. Are the sites attractive? Do they present the information about the client's business in a clear and concise way that suits the type of business or organization the website is promoting? Do all the links work? Is it easy to find your way from one page to another with the fewest possible clicks? Make sure to look at these portfolio sites on more than one computer, and in browsers other than IE, such as Netscape and Opera. Do the portfolio sites work in all browsers and op systems? Do the sites load quickly even on a slow dialup connection? Do they look okay regardless of the size of the computer screen or its resolution? If you can answer yes to all these questions, and the designer writes validating code, you may have found yourself a website designer.
Search engine optimization is the hardest area for the layperson to judge. Some simple things to look for in the portfolio sites are repeating keywords in text, text links to sites with similar or complementary content, and the use of search engine metatags in the source code. What's a metatag? It's at the top of any page of code, in the head section and lists a description and keywords within the tags. in IE you can view/source and see the code for any page, in Netscape or Mozilla it's view/pagesource. Within the first couple inches of code you should be able to see these meta tags. If the client's site sells widgets the word "widgets" better be repeated carefully throughout the site's text and throughout the site's code, as well as in the meta tags on every page of the site. There should also be some links to widget related content on other websites. How many sites link to this one? Run the domain name through a search engine and see. This is crucial. Incoming links count for a lot.
Do you need a plugin you don't have in order to view any of the sites? If the answer to this question is yes, then you definitely need to look at other accessibility issues. Things you can do to check accessibility are to resize the browser screen narrower or resize the browser font larger. If everything's still mostly where it should be, and functional, it's a reasonably accessible site.
If after looking at all these areas you've judged that the website designer is capable of creating your webpresence, then you've found yourself a KICKASS web designer!