Best Website Designers for Small Businesses

Even the most basic of websites is designed somehow and you don't need to pay a lot of money for great design although you must have developed some thoughts on what your site is to achieve before you think of hiring anyone that's affordable.

If your website is simply a sales letter or a lead capture form then there is limited work required in the actual design as you only really need to top and tail the letter and have a masthead.

It's where you have an ecommerce store where design is important to be able to present a professional image and entice people to purchase.

The pricing should not be too high because there are plenty of templates you can download and simply add in your own logo.

Design Principles

Good design is mostly in the eye of the beholder and when you are starting off it's best to look at sites in your industry that are successful to look at their design and see how it works. Some of the most successful websites are simply practical and easy to navigate. They present the information the user or visitor is looking for upfront and don't make it difficult to make a purchase and this is what you should have in mind to start with. A great book is entitled "don't make me think, stupid" which is the point you need to have before you start spending thousands developing a site no one can use.

If you think back to when boo.com was launched this was completely over engineered for the time in that it used a lot of flash and technology that hardly any one could access. All people wanted to do was purchase but they couldn't because the site was trying to load too much information and couldn't cope with the demands of all the visitors.

So functionality is important but so too is colour and speed. Images should be condensed so they load quickly but colour has many connotations when put online and offline in print etc. People only take 5 or 6 seconds to look at a website to see if they wish to continue on their journey. They need to be able to trust the site and colour plays a part. Think about your favourite sites and how they work. Big online shopping stores are the ones to look at such as tescos.com who have vast amounts of data to play with to ensure they squeeze the last drop of value out of each visitor. Tescos will spend less attention to fancy items on their site because they are a well known brand so if you are less well know your design needs to compete with them.

Finding a Suitable Design

Before briefing any designer on a job you should have a rough idea in your head of what you want your site to look like. Sketch out on paper the home page, and internal navigation pages and a product page that you believe it should portray. Like with most aspects of life getting recommendations is the best method of finding a good web designer because if you ask on the forums for recommended suppliers you'll likely end up with posts from designers touting for business although it may be a good place to start to see what other business owner come up with. If that fails, how about....

Do it Yourself HTML and CSS

If you have a flair for designing perhaps you can learn the basics of HTML and CSS so you could code the site yourself? It's a long drawn out process but this means you'll have the skills for life rather than paying out &poud;500 or so for each website you develop. You can not steal other peoples images or borders etc and you'll also probably have to know how to use photoshop or other graphic making software to design all the extras.

Free Design Templates

There are thousands of free design templates on the net which you can download and use but there are two major warnings with these. 1) The coding of the template will have massively bloated code which will render the template almost unusable and very difficult to adapt as these have been designed mainly by using Dreamweaver and microsoft Front Page and 2) most of the images will not have rights past to you as they will be taken from the online libraries but any rights the designers have (if indeed they have purchased the rights) will not pass to you and you may find you end up with a invoice and fine from the company or person who owns the images.

Wordpress Templates

There are many free wordpress templates on the market which are actually very good. Follow the links from the Wordpress site to see what's available. These are much easier to edit and have been mainly designed by webmasters who design from a user and technical viewpoint first rather than design first and coding second. Again the images may not have rights associated with them so you may have to source your own images for your website.

Hosting Company Templates

Many hosting companies provide online website building packages that take a novice designer through each stage of choosing a design from a template gallery and adding in text for each page. These are great but the coding will be poor so it may be a good starting point but you'll want to design your own site later as many companies will be using the same templates. Additionally, many of the packages only allow you to create maybe 3 to 5 pages which is next to useless if you are a developing company.