How to choose the web design agency that suits you?

When you want to take forward a web project, the first decision is to decide which web design agency you want to hire to carry it out. It seems like a simple choice but it is not. We propose a checklist that helps you in the choice:

Web design is not enough

The first and most important point is not to choose a web design agency, it seems a weird statement but it is not. If you want your web project to be successful, you must choose a web agency that is a web design agency and, at the same time, a digital marketing agency. There are many companies that offer web design, however in any web project the design stage is just one piece of all the process and often less important than the online marketing piece. There are many agencies that can offer web design services but that do not cover all the aspects of digital marketing. Choosing this option will lead you directly to failure as we can end up with a beautiful and functional website but that will not be easily rank in search engine results. Accordingly, you have to choose a web design agency that is also a seo agency, leaving aside options such as advertising agencies and graphic design agencies.

Better to try a local web agency in your city

We recommend choosing, whenever possible, a web design agency that is closest to you. While it is true that most of the work can be done remotely and by videoconference, it is also true that design presentations are always better to be done in face-to-face meetings. The reason is easy to answer, when we present the design of the website, we are guided mainly by the comments of the client, but also by their non-verbal communication, a certain gesture indicates if we have succeeded or not and, these gestures, are very difficult to capture through a video call, so if your company is from Barcelona, we recommend you choose a web design agency in Barcelona.

A web project is a team task

It is crucial that you always opt for agencies and not for freelancers. There are freelancers with a high professional training and very capable to perform high specialist tasks. However, creating a website is a team work in which you need at least:

• A project manager who organizes the project and understands your business strategy.
• An SEO consultant who proposed and implements the SEO strategy of the project from the very first moment.
• A web designer who catches the client's idea and knows how to capture it graphically and in conjunction with the other players.
• A web programmer who creates the back office and the necessary functionalities.
• A front end that converts graphic design into a web page and implements the necessary functionalities in terms of usability.

Maybe even a content generator and a copywriter. These differentiated roles can only be offered by web design companies that have large and specialized teams.

Two web designers better than just one

Hire a web design agency that has at least two web designers on staff. There are web designers who are very good with very corporate designs while other designers tend to excel in more innovative or disruptive designs. It has nothing to do with proposing a web design for a metallurgical company than for an online store selling cosmetics to teenagers. Any web agency must be able to choose the best designer profile for your project.

Advertising agencies do not make web pages, they outsource them

In line with the previous point, it is very important that the company that is going to execute the web project performs all these tasks in-house and never outsource them. Outsourcing tasks are usually more expensive and, above all, has a cost in terms of time and quality of execution. It's simple, an external person will hardly be able to participate in the whole project, will have other priorities to meet and will not be available all the time.

Suppose the client hires an advertising agency or a graphic design agency to carry out their web project. The process will be, more or less, as follows:

1. The advertising agency will meet with the client and obtain the requirements of the project, then transfer them to its design team that will make the look & feel proposal.
2. It is at this point that the advertising agency will look for a programming company that will code the design devised by the advertising agency, a design that probably will not have taken into account any SEO -search engine optimization- criteria.
3. When you already have the design programmed, here are two options: either tell the client that the work is already done and he has achieved an astonishing website… and that’s it, or...
4. That you hire a digital marketing agency to carry out the promotion of the website in terms of SEO and, probably, SEM.

Obviously, each time we move from one stage to the next one, there will be dysfunctions since the project has been carried out strictly sequentially and each actor has taken part just in one phase phase without having participated in the rest of the stages in a decisive way. We must also bear in mind that each actor involves an additional cost that the client will end up paying. It is estimated that a project carried out by an advertising agency usually costs twice or triple that of the same project carried out by a single web agency.

Expertise is a degree

Generally, when hiring a web design agency there is a point that is not taken into sufficient consideration: expertise. When we talk about expertise, we do not refer to the years of life of the company, we refer to knowledge accumulated by its team. To create a good web project, you have to have done many before, know what really works and, above all, what does not work. And this is only provided by long hours of work and previous experiences. This point is particularly important when we try to implement your business strategy to the website, it is at this point where a high degree of knowledge and expertise is needed.

Everything has a price and needs time

As we have explained previously, a web project goes through various stages in which various actors participate, the clear consequence is that any web project takes time and has a cost that must be kept in mind. Developing a great website in few days and inexpensively is a fallacy. In our agency we are used to second chances, we very often end up working with clients who have asked us for a quote initially and who have preferred cheaper options, agencies that only offer web design but not digital marketing services including SEO services or directly by freelancers. In the end the client has ended up paying for two websites, one that has ended up in the trash and another that is the one with which he will finally work.

Conclusions

Choosing a web agency is not easy, it is important that you choose a digital marketing agency with tons of expertise that offers both web design services and SEO or web positioning agency, that is close to you and that has a multidisciplinary team that takes care of the entire process without outsourcing any part of it.