Web Design - 7 Key things to avoid

A search for "web design" on Google returns more than 325
million results. So how do we start eliminating all these so
called designers? Here are a few of the most common shortcomings.

Watch out for:

 1. Templates 2. Subdomains 3. DIY Hosting 4. High Renewal Costs
5. Poor Coding 6. Inaccessible Design 7. Advertising / Self
Promotion

1. Templates

Watch out for designers offering you a choice of templates. This
not only means that they're doing no new design work for their
fee but could also have an affect on your search engine ranking.
If the search engine robots see the same layout, background
images and styles over and over again they could penalise your
site for being a copy of another site. Best avoided.

2. Subdomains

Watch out for design services offering you your own domain where
the address still includes a reference to another company. You
should have a domain in this form - www.yourcompany.com. Watch
out for www.yourcompany.hostingcompany.com or
www.hostingcompany.com/yourcompany. These forms mean that they
are putting your site in a folder of their own site and it
doesn't carry as much weight. It's an easy way of them saving
money and giving you a lesser sevice.

3. DIY Hosting

Watch out for anyone who does their own hosting. If their server
goes down it could mean that your site disappears. Servers can
be left on for long periods of time but do need to be restarted
occasionally. You don't want your site going down - there could
be someone in the middle of using it. If they claim to offer
hosting find out if they outsource it to a professional company.
This is much safer.

4. High Renewal Costs

Watch out for hidden costs. It's quite common for design
companies to offer you a full all singing all dancing site for a
great price only for you to find that it will cost you half of
that again the following year. There are always ongoing costs to
a website, hosting and domain name renewal. If there are no
ongoing costs quoted, monthly or annual, be wary.

5. Poor Coding

Watch out for poor coding. HTML, the language of web pages, is
developing and changing all the time. In fact, HTML is on its
way out to be replaced by an enhanced language called XHTML.
Look at a page the designer has done or their own site. View the
source code and look at the section between the head tags (the
word "head" in between angled brackets). Any mention of "style"
or a ".css" file is a good sign. Now look at the section between
the body tags. If you see lots of tags in angled brackets like
"font" or "td" then the page coding is showing its age.

6. Inaccessible Design

Watch out for inaccessible design. This is very similar to the
last point. It's important that your site can be used not only
by PC users but also by the visually impaired, people using
palmtops, PDAs and mobile devices. You can't afford to reduce
your audience by having an inaccessible design.

7. Advertising / Self Promotion

Watch out for the design company using your website as a means
of marketing themselves. Whilst having a discreet link to their
company site at the foot of the page is quite fair and
reasonable, be wary of any additional links or advertising. They
could be making money selling advertising space which you're
paying for.