In today’s digital age, you need to have a strong online presence for your business, brand or product.
These days, people no longer meet their suppliers or clients at their bricks and mortar business places. They meet mostly online.
To achieve a strong business online presence, you need to ensure that your business’ website is relevant, engaging, and interesting to customers, prospects, and other consumers. A prospect is your potential customer.
Whether you are planning to create a new website from scratch or just want to upgrade an existing one, you need to find a web development team that can perform that task for you.
We’ve compiled some tips for you on how to choose the best development company:
- Define your requirements
Before even going into the web development process, you need to know exactly what kind of result you expect. Nowadays, every business go for an online presence, but not everyone seems to understand how to do it properly. That’s why you should specify what features you require. Here are a few points to consider:
Purpose — identify what you want your website to do for you. Functionality depends on the type of website you choose, e.g. informative, entertaining, social networking, or e-commerce.
Target audience — who are your target audience and how do you plan to satisfy their needs.
Design — think of the interface that would be appealing to your customers, while reflecting your brand’s message. If you are not sure about this one, simply observe your reactions next time you browse the Internet. Mark the sites you find attractive and also the ones you don’t like. That can give you a few tips, and also, later on, help the web development team better understand your ideas.
Brand personality — see your website as the main means of forming lasting emotional connections with your clients, that will make your business beat the competition.
Social media presence — Decide how your platform will interact with social media networking sites.
- Check company’s credentials
Have it in mind that the web development company is not just a service provider you’ll never hear of again once the project is done. This team is likely to become your tech partner for quite a long time.
If you manage to find people with whom you are on the same page, consider it as a huge bonus. To improve your chances of getting that dream team, take these steps before making a commitment:
Check their portfolio — making analysis of their past projects will help you understand whether the company can create a website according to your goals, vision, and requirements.
Check feedbacks — Read comments about the company’s performance on industry-related web-portals; skim through their website as well as their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles for more information.
- Post-project support
You will need to make changes to your web pages occasionally. It might be something simple such as editing contact information, but at some point, you might also decide to add a completely new feature.
To ensure that you would have the ability to make such adjustments, it’s better to figure out what services you can expect from your partner after the project is completed. Basically, there are two levels of support —updates and ongoing maintenance.
Updates
Updates include minor changes that your folks can do in-house. Most of the time, you won’t have to call an expert web engineer to help you out. This should be possible through a content management system (CMS) provided with the site. To avoid any issues later on, ask your designer ahead if they can incorporate this solution.
Ongoing maintenance
Ongoing maintenance includes keeping the security systems up-to-date to prevent hacker/cyber-attacks, bugs, and fixing/troubleshooting in case the website suddenly goes down and you need to restore your data. Check out with the company what type of ongoing support they provide.
- Quality assurance
When launching your website, it is important to make sure that it has no problems. When you launch something like a website, you are giving people and other businesses a first impression of you and your company, so you can afford to create a bad first impression.
Ensure you check these areas:
Design — as the site will be viewed in different browsers and on various devices, its user interface should be easy to use.
Web content — proofreading texts for grammar, spelling, punctuation, or lexical mistakes need to be checked.
Contact forms — make sure they contain the right information so that your clients can get in touch with you.
Navigation — make sure there is a slider and scroll bar, menu options, search function and filters. There should be no faulty links.
SEO effectiveness — all titles, tags, and Meta descriptions should be short, informative, and include keywords to help both humans and search engines navigate the site.
Are you in need of professional web development for your business? Artgro Internet Marketing company, Houston TX is here to help you achieve greater returns on your business investment. Contact us today and let our team of experts provide the best web development services for you.