10 Tips For Avoiding Web Design Fraud

Authored By: Christina Keffer on September 17^th, 2007

Choosing where you have your website built is a lot like choosing where you are going to have your car fixed. Both situations involve hiring work out to people when you may not have a specific idea of what needs to be done, how much it will cost, or what complications may arise during the job, and both situations involve the risk of getting totally gauged and cheated. However, just like there are steps that can be taken to find a mechanic that is honest and not out to get you, there are steps one can take to find a web development company that is honest and straightforward. There are also a number of things to look for in order to avoid the ones that ARE out to get you.

1. NEVER trust people who promise Search Engine rankings or claim to have special “insider deals” with the major search engines. The ONLY thing that the Search Engines are concerned with is giving their users the absolute best search results for the key word that was searched for. That’s why you can’t buy placement on Google in the first place. Anyone who claims to be able to guarantee rankings is lying to you.

2. Beware of offers to “Submit your site to all the major Search Engines.” This is a largely useless practice. If you have to submit a site, that means it not visible by organic means such as inbound links and social notoriety. This is already a bad thing. A site should be able to be found by the SEs naturally after a few days of good search engine marketing. The only reason to manually submit your site is to get all of the individual pages indexed. It is not an absolutely necessary thing by any means, and you should not pay through the nose to have it done.

3. Always retain the ability to contact your individual web designer personally. Many firms are based in America but outsource their design work to other countries where the quality may not be up to our standards.

4. Most of the time, web design firms will have a portfolio of sites which they have either created or worked on. Don’t just look at their screen shots. Go to the websites and contact the owners to get an accurate report of their experiences with the company you’re investigating. Sometimes, illegitimate web designers will put up sites that they actually had nothing to do with in their portfolio. Do your due diligence.

5. A good web design company with a lot of experience behind it usually has a good idea of how long most of the more mundane aspects of a web site take to develop. When discussing the cost of your website, keep in mind that a good web design firm will be totally transparent. They will outline their billing procedures for you and provide an accurate idea of how long things will take. If their time estimates are drastically different than others have given you, there’s either a breakdown in communication, or they’re underestimating how long a certain aspect of your website will take to create on purpose.

6. Beware of hosting scams. If your web designers are offering free hosting for six months or a year, that is not a problem, but find out where your site will be hosted and the hosting package you’ll be getting. It’s important to know things about the bandwidth you are allotted and the processor speed you will have so that you can tell how quickly your site will load for your visitors and how many visitors you can have at a time. If you are getting free hosting, but your site is slow or always down, that’s not really a good deal.

7. If you are looking for web hosting apart from your web designer you want to be especially aware of falling prey to hosting schemes. Look out for places that charge you for a full year’s hosting up front. They usually provide low quality hosting and have no hope of keeping anyone on a month by month plan. Also beware of places that are offering “unlimited space” or “Zero downtime.” The only way you’ll have zero downtime is if they are not rebooting the systems for maintenance like security updates, and you certainly don’t want that. If the plan looks too good, it usually is!

8. Make sure that the web design company you’re looking at will purchase your domain name under your name and with your money! If you choose to leave them at any time, for any reason, you must make sure that you have control over your domain name, otherwise they can force you to buy it from them or pay a hefty transfer fee. The same goes for hosting. Before agreeing to having them host your website, make sure they will not charge you a fee for changing the hosting if you are not satisfied with the hosting you have.

9. If you’re buying or registering your domain name through the web developer, make sure you look into its history. Search for it online to make sure it shows up somewhere in the search engines. Often times, unscrupulous people will sell domain names that have been optimized using bad practices and are being filtered or penalized by the search engines.

10. Make sure the design company has a track record of producing everything they advertise. They could be really strong in the design aspects, and really bad on the marketing side of things. If you’re paying to have your website designed AND marketed, make sure that’s what you’ll be getting!

Deciding who will create your online presence is an incredibly important decision. Take the time and energy to find out what you’ll REALLY be getting. A lot of research and comparison shopping now could save you months or even years of trouble and headaches in the future.

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As you know, when making any change or transition with your business, it’s important to ensure that the process is carefully planned and executed. This holds true when you make the leap to having a business presence on the Internet. Sure, it’s possible to just pay a local kid Rs. 1500 to put together a quick few pages about your business, with some pictures or maybe a little map showing your retail location. However – like anything else, a job done incorrectly now can cause a waste of time and money long into the future.

There are a few (five! we promise) key things that you may want to keep in mind when introducing your business to the online world:

1) Ensure your site is built with an industry-standard Content Management System or CMS – we can’t stress how important this is. There is absolutely nothing that will annoy you more than having a website that’s difficult or impossible to make changes to. With a CMS you are able to quickly login through a standard web browser to a graphical backend to your website. From here you will be able to edit any of the site’s content and usually you will be able to edit the design and layout as well. Skyweb builds our clients’ sites on the WordPress platform, which powers tens of millions of webpages and weblogs around the world.

2) Do not sign an agreement with your website designer that locks you in to using their services - if you end up wanting to use another company for whatever reason, or if you become dissatisfied with your designer, or web host, you will become very frustrated. There’s no need to be locked in to your website company for a lengthy contract term. SkyWeb especially recommends reading any fine print (we don’t use fine print!) you encounter in your service agreement that may end up costing you “nickel-and-dime” fees for virtually everything. Want the specials on the front page changed? Ding. Want to add some new staff profiles to your site? Ding. Keep your eyes peeled for the fine print!

3) Remember that this is now your new “first impression” – you need the site to be professional and to reflect your business. The details matter very much when it comes to websites. It’s wise to spend a bit of extra cash on a photographer if you want pictures of your business taken. Your website is going to only be as good as the weakest piece of content on it, so if you’re out there with a Rs. 3000 digicam taking shots in the rain, your entire site will reflect that. If you’d like to have your staff members featured on your site, ensure that their headshots are taken professionally and that their attire is what you want to reflect in your business. You’ll get no opportunity to communicate directly with website visitors to give them the “pitch” – so your site has to be good enough to hook them to convert from prospects to clients. Having said this, the most important part of your new first impression is Number 4…

4) Get a proper website domain name. Please. – Aim for the .com or the country base (like gravytrain.ca where .ca is Canada) for your business. Internet users have started to develop a taste for top-level domains and what they feel the site attached to them is going to contain. If your site is burnabyflorist.ca or burnabyflorist.com, it will have a much better perception than burnabyflorist.info, burnabyflorist.biz or even weirder domains like burnabyflorist.cc. Because of the way the search engines rank websites, it is important to have keywords inside your domain name that reflect your business. www.burnabyweddingflorist.com is going to rank higher for a different search term than www.burnabyflowersandgifts.com. Also note that domains are about Rs,465 a year, so you can buy more than one domain that will point to your website. It is common to have the initial form of a long name (www.bfg.ca) registered as well as the full name (www.burnabyflowersandgifts.ca) and just have both domains pointing at your website.

5) Content, content, content… content is king – Just like you continually bring in new products, have sales and specials, and do things to ensure repeat business, your website needs to continually have fresh content IF you care about having people returning to it regularly. Now, SkyWeb highly recommends having some sort of new article or information posted to your website on at least a weekly basis. We offer this service to our clients so they don’t have to worry about generating the content themselves. For example, our Burnaby Florist might decide that he would like to write a weekly weblog about flowers, only to decide that three weeks in he’s too busy to bother. We handle writing this content which will continue to draw users back to the site to see what’s new, get new tips, and then of course your business’ brand is refreshed in their minds. 

This wonderful article featured on Gravytrain website and has been adapted for Indian readers

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