5 things to look for in a website designer

1. 1. Listening skills

   You want the final website to be your website, achieving your aims for it, and—in one way or another—incorporating your input. A good designer will help you clarify your goals, your specific targets, your target visitors—and your idea of a successful website.

2. 2. Marketing skills

   An experienced designer will be familiar with all the ins and outs of “Search Engine Optimisation” and will have experience of achieving particular goals with particular groups of people.

3. 3. Design skills

   A good designer will be able to show you examples of visually compelling pages—and also explain how individual pages, plus features on those pages, connect up to achieve the website’s goals.

4. 4. Coding skills

   If the designer is part of a larger team, then there may be a separate ‘developer’ who translates visual designs into actual Web pages. Otherwise, the designer will need to be at home at least with HTML 5, CSS (with all the recent extra features), JavaScript/jQuery and (very likely) PHP and MySQL.

5. 5. Professional tools

   You can ask any designer, “What Web design software do you use?” Ever since Adobe merged with Macromedia, all the most useful tools have been contained in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. So this is the best answer to receive. If you get another answer, Google the names you are given.

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