Introduction

Setting up a new business is an exciting time; you might have been an employee within a large company for, say, the last 25 years, and now, you’re jumping into running your very own limited company.

You have bold plans and ideas. You want to bring your company to the market and offer something new to the customer.

You believe you will have the edge over the competition and are eager and ambitious to grow your business.

You therefore want to grow your business into something that you are proud of.

When you sit back and plan your businesses growth, often the business owner often writes out a business plan for say the next 5 years. For some businesses, such as those business which are setting up in Cardiff, Wales, 100% of their customers may come via online marketing.

Therefore you may plan advertise on social media or are working on improving organic SEO, the key to the success of your online advertising is a well-designed website.

So many Cardiff web design businesses to pick from

Now, the good news is this: what is spoilt for choice when picking local website designers.

There are many freelancers which working in spare bedrooms, right through large marketing agencies in the United Kingdom that can easily employ over 300 staff.

So the price point for each company to design the website is different; a point that we are trying to make here is that there is an ample amount of web designers catering for all sorts of budgets, so your bound to find a web designer who can build a new website for the price you had budgeted.

We here at our web designers, have seen websites have been advertised for as low £300, and companies offering brochure websites sometimes well over £11,000.

We have a range of different companies out there to choose from, but this does beg the question, how do you pick a Cardiff website designer?

Well, we are not impartial- as we are a well known web design company.

Yet with that said, we can provide some helpful pointers on things you might want to consider when picking a local designer.

So, without further ado, let’s give you some food for thought on what you might wish to consider when choosing a new web developer or designer.

Can you work with that person

Now? You might think this is obvious- right?

But at this stage, you might be wondering if this blog post is even worth reading? However, hold your horses for a second, as we are going to dispense quality advice your way.

Working with a WordPress designer or another type of web designer is often not a one-off process.

You often need to liaise with that person over many months or years regarding discussions regarding backing up the website, hosting, SEO, and making amendments to the website.

Therefore, if you find a person difficult to deal with on the telephone, that they are quite, well obnoxious, or that they just don’t get back to you within a reasonable time frame, then this is an indication that you need to cut your losses and go to another web design business.

However, you should also assess at the initial meeting can you work with the web designers over a long period of time.

Choose the right content management system for your business

We are huge fans and great promoters of the content management system “WordPress”. It’s important to remember that it’s not the only show in town, and you do have to meet different agencies that may advise you to use different content management systems that better suit your businesses needs.

Take your time choosing the right CMS

Yet, for many of our clients, after seeing the admin panel and dashboard on WordPress, they often find it very user-friendly and simple to use.

As highly skilled web designers, we are sometimes shown other content management systems that are not so user-friendly, they can even be sometimes rather challenging to use, and full of glitches, and sometimes, these companies dissipate into thin air because there’s not a lot of uptake for that particular CMS.

WordPress is used by millions of companies globally

On the other hand, this is why we chose WordPress: It’s been around for a very long time.

Over our ten years we have been running our business, it’s been one of the most widely used CMS by Cardiff businesses.

It continues to be popular because people see that it is good quality, simple to use, open source, widely respected as a good CMS by web developers, and used by millions of businesses. Some global brands use WordPress.

But don’t take our word for it; step back and evaluate which content management system is best for your business. Is it WordPress, or is it the different types of CMS?

Ongoing maintenance

You might get up in the morning and have a nice refreshing cup of coffee and a croissant.
Then, for the day, you might make a list of things you want to do when at your business premises, and you’re excited to get to work to implement those things that you want to do today.

But as any good business owner knows, it’s easy to get sidetracked.

One hundred and one things can get in the way of doing what you’re supposed to do. You might get home-put your slippers on, switch on the television, evaluate your to do list you wrote out in the morning, and think, well, I can even get even quarter of that done today.

As business owners say, it’s difficult to sometimes juggle everything that needs to get done.
You often don’t have time to manage your website’s maintenance: updating the plug-ins, making backups, and fixing little glitches fixed on your website.

So, who will take care of the ongoing WordPress website maintenance?

Again, this is something you should discuss with designers because, trust us, some web designers charge a small fortune for this monthly work.

Often the business gets sucked into a supercheap web design price, so low that even the customers are thinking about how do the designers make money and do this.

Then you see them in the small print.

Sometimes, for ongoing maintenance, the designers charge a monthly fee for hosting and maintenance.

This might be £75 per month, which doesn’t sound much when you add up over the lifetime of the website; well, that becomes costly for some businesses, especially all you have is let’s say, seven pages or less.

Ask about what is the hourly rate to make amendments

As we know, sometimes staff come and go, the services your business offers may change, and so do the products, and this often means the website needs to be updated.

Now, if you receive your web design invoice for amendments made to your company website end of the month, and it shocks you in terms of the fee, so much that you have a shocked expression on your face all day, all this is no good.

Therefore, you need a web design company that offers a fair hourly price to make amendments to your website. So much so that you are not frightened to make changes to the website because of fearing how much it will cost.

Therefore, you need to check with your web designers how much they charge to make website amendments. You might need many amendments every single month. For example, you might need to amend a new staff member, or perhaps you no longer stock the product so you need it removed.

Functionality

One of our favourite TV commercials, which was on TV long ago, was created by a different advertising firm that used the strapline. Isn’t it nice when things work?

That’s an amazing strapline we think.

Because it’s true: You know things that are produced today are sometimes overly complicated, just too technical, and sometimes we lose appreciation for the simple things, things that just work.

The first thing is to pick are web designers who know how to design quality websites.

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Let’s leave you with that thought: the success of a business can sometimes be in the hands of your web designers to pick your next web design agency carefully and spend your time evaluating what they’re offering for the money.