17 Sep Hiring a Vancouver Freelance Web Designer
If you are considering hiring a freelance web designer in Vancouver, there are many to choose from and all are competing for similar clientele. I was on Facebook a few days ago and saw an ad for a web design company (a freelancer really) who was promising responsive, mobile-friendly design for around $900. Always curious about what other website designers are doing, I visited their website. Their “recent work” page consisted of four thumbnail images, only two of which led to an actual website (one of them incomplete).
I’m not judging here: everyone starts somewhere, but this freelancer’s websites were certainly not as advertised. They were in no way, shape or form mobile-friendly and two of four the samples were nothing more than a heading and a couple of paragraphs upon a very large JPG background. Cheap can be cheap and good, or cheap can be cheap and really very bad. Would a client get $900 of value from the freelancer I’ve mentioned? They may think they are getting value, but with a very little bit of education they’d see they are not. A website is more than a large graphic with text positioned upon it.
Questions to ask a freelance web designer
Clients owe it to themselves to ask questions and educate themselves (a little) about web design. You may very well get a good design for $900 but you should know exactly what you are getting for your money.
- Will my website be viewable in most modern browsers? Do you cross-platform test?
- Do you write the code yourself? Are you using Dreamweaver? Are you using someone else’s web template?
- Will the code be valid HTML5 or close-to-valid HTML5?
- Are you using CSS or a table-based layout?
- Can I get a reference from a client or two?
- How long have you been designing websites, doing Web marketing, SEO?
- Will my site be mobile-friendly?
- Do I have to pay for images in the design or are they included in the price?
- Are you providing a wireframe of the website so we can envision how it will function?
- How many mockups will you provide?
- How many revisions are included in the price?
- Is content insertion and formatting part of the quoted cost or extra?
- Do they provide SEO services as part of a website package?
- How long will it take to design my website?
- In the end, who owns the copyright on the graphics and website itself?
These are just a few questions that can help you decide whether or not you are getting value for what you are paying. You may be able to find a Vancouver freelance website designer who’ll design a site for a few hundred dollars — I’ve seen many such ads on Craigslist — but what, exactly are you getting? Make sure you look under the hood and kick the tires before you buy.
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