Online 101: Finding a Web Site Designer

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What do you want?
If your Web site will be more of a "here is who we are" promotional area, you won't need to make that many monthly changes to it. Catalog sites and most that offer products or services for sale, however, require frequent updates on listings and prices. The fewer changes you will be making, the easier it will be to have an outsider handle the ongoing maintenance.

What other services do you provide? If there's nobody at your own company or ISP who can do upgrades to the site, ask the designers about ongoing design and content maintenance. What will they charge to make regular updates such as pricing changes, addition of new products, removal of old ones, and changes in links to other sites? How often can they make these changes? Daily? Weekly? How much will it cost to add new pages or scan in additional graphics? Details should be spelled out in the contract. Ask, too, if they'll help you find a service provider and register a company domain name.

Can you work with our in-house technical people?
If someone at your company will be helping design the site, establish up front how involved that person will be with the outside designers. If your person can write in HTML, ask the designers if they're available just to organize the site, with the in-house person doing the actual creation.

When can we see a mock-up?
If there are several designers you like, consider paying each of them to create mock-ups for comparison. These mock-ups should look like little flow charts, showing how visitors would progress from one page to the next, and where links to outside pages might be. Don't expect fancy graphics and meaningful text--the samples should mostly illustrate how users would navigate your Web site.

What will you spend?
Before making any decision, it's useful to compare expenses. According to interviews with 65 small companies--companies ranging from manufacturers to retailers and covering both high and low-tech industries--the average site took 2.6 months to create from inception to debut on the Web. Outside design teams cost an average of $13,000, plus $300 a month for ongoing work. Using an internal employee for Web site construction cost an estimated $15,000, on average.

How much will this cost?
Designers price themselves many different ways. Some charge by the project, some by the hour, and some by the page. Hourly rates range from $30 to 100, usually depending on the experience level of the designer, but not necessarily. Because it's a new industry, there's no pricing standardization yet. The cheapest designers are those without much experience, willing to take on their first clients at a discount rate in return for finished products to list on their resumes. Many small companies gamble on untried designers. It's risky--stories of missed deadlines and disappearing designers abound. But some get lucky. The site for Hot Hot Hot, a food store with a flashy online presence, was first designed by a firm called Profound, in Palo Alto, California. It was Profound's first Web job, so Hot Hot Hot got a discount. The colorful, eye-catching area got a lot of attention from consumers and the media.

Can you design a fast-loading site?
One of the most important things to remember about design is that most visitors will be reaching your site using modems, not leased lines. Modems can be slow and the people using them are impatient; they don't like to wait for anything to load. Even if you have the most exciting interactive graphic on the entire Web, if it takes too long to load, nobody will look at it a second time. The classic mistake many small companies make is to include a large company logo or scanned photograph of employees on their homepage. Color graphics take up the most storage space on the computer and are much slower to load than text. By the time customers complain, it's too late to recapture those visitors who left without complaining. Try to look at the sites the designers have already made using a slow modem connection--14,400 baud or less.

How much of my own time will the design take?
Many companies that launch a Web site soon realize that it takes a lot of time and effort to keep it current and interesting. At some point, most companies appoint or hire a Webmaster to take over this project. At the beginning, though, it may fall on you. Ask the designer about the experiences of their other clients, and consider calling these clients directly to hear about their adventures.

Phaedra Hise is the author of Growing Your Business Online: Small-Business Strategies for Working the World Wide Web (Henry Holt, 1996) from which this article is excerpted.