6 Clues To A Superior Website
Treasure hunt for a creative-unicorn-design studio
Let’s say you work at a business, small startup, or a huge corpo enterprise. Maybe you run it with your team, maybe you serve as a manager, maybe you are the voice of initiative at meetings. In any case, you want it to look GREAT. You want people online to see your business the way you see it — mature, laid-back, trustworthy, responsible, or all of those at once.
Given that you are reading this on our blog, you might be looking for a creative studio, a web design agency, some kind of graphic wizards, and marketing aces that could deliver it.
Clearly, there is a pool of hundreds of agencies and web design studios available at Behance, Dribble, and other creative hiring platforms. But close-up research takes a lot of effort and supposing you don’t get to hire web designers every other month, it would be nice to have some kind of roadmap — hints and pro tips that would help to build a shortlist and, eventually, pick the one right vendor for your company.
We don’t share those clues below to try and sell you our own services. For six years we have crafted unique designs for a huge array of customers from all kinds of backgrounds and accumulated data on key factors to building a lasting partnership between a client and a studio.
Now is the time to share it — because no company should stay without a decent online narration. And there is no reason for the process of finding a design vendor to be a tiresome journey in the dark.
1. Portfolio.
Going through case studies is an obvious method of checking designers’ capabilities, researching the diversity of completed projects, or falling in love with studio signature style. There are awesome aggregators like awwwards.com to get lost in dozens of pages exhibiting creativity. But it is not only about a demonstration of unique creativity and a score of finished projects.
When you determine a shortlist of web design studios that caught your eye, we encourage you to take a closer look at what kind of companies they have worked with, analyze if they are crossing with your industry or brand direction. If you are running a craft brewing business, for example, developers of the most advanced trading dashboard might be unable to help, but designers for lifestyle or cultural brand could be already in sync with your audience.
2. Lifespan.
Your perfect vendor is experienced in design, that’s the reason to hire. However, how much experience is expected? Studios with less than 3 years under their belt might be talented, but immature. Design skills of any particular team don’t cut it without customer journey practices built and tested over time.
On the other hand, design companies of 10+ years usually shift to the marketing or development area, as the younger agencies more susceptible to novel trends take the stage. Check-in with your branding goals to put another filter on the vendor funnel.
3. Reviews.
Is there anything that builds trust in vendors more than authentic positive feedback, better yet, word of mouth? Independent aggregators like Clutch present both summarized ratings of a company and unedited feedback from customers.
Another way to get an unrallied point of view is literally googling the potential vendor and skimming through the first page of search results. Do they participate in design competitions? Do people talk about them? Have they reached the claimed goals, and most importantly — do these goals sound like yours?
4. Time.
Eisenhower used to say, “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Sounds harsh, but the seed thought is that the projects of greater value take time and should not be carried out hastily, while the ones you expect to be finished in a jiff are better not be strategic or crucial.
Practically speaking, you want to steer clear of the long-term offerings that won’t deliver business value for a year (truth be told, the behemoths of that attitude are scarce today), but a reckless rush of a “fast-food” web-design would undersell the new company image. Don’t go for hustle, find people who will offer you a reasonable and detailed time plan.
5. Price.
It’s past the middle of the article, at this point you are certainly not a bypasser and you are wondering how much this whole thing is going to cost you. That is something your prospective vendor also wants to know! (Except for the guys with the flat fee, who could be your option in case you are specifically looking for a standard template solution).
Creators of custom design need to get to talk to you, evaluate the project volume, define if any specific assets to be developed, predict how long the industry research would take. Sounds expensive? Doesn’t have to be! By the dops.digital handbook we do the rough estimate on our own dime and split the work (and payment!) in stages.
Our customer tracks the progress and can quit after any stage if not satisfied, and we have skin in continuous delivery.
6. Location.
The last criteria, and this time it is the least indeed. The world has gone digital long before COVID-19 emerged, but the psychological comfort of working with companies located nearby lingers. It is the hope of finding people of the same culture and language that will understand your business the way you do — and help the world understand it too.
The last criteria, and this time it is the least indeed. The world has gone digital long before COVID-19 emerged, but the psychological comfort of working with companies located nearby lingers. It is the hope of finding people of the same culture and language that will understand your business the way you do — and help the world understand it too.
There is a lot of vision and fresh approach to be found abroad. The digitalization first effect, in our mind, is not connecting each and everyone in a Zoom meeting, but fusing and spreading a mentality of common practices and references, which enables us to speak the same mindset language with customers from at least seven countries.
End of the map. Now what?
We hope with those protips it will be much easier for you to find a great match for your brand in the design world.
One last thing though you should do before starting the search is to ask yourself what are the main challenges you look to solve with the new design. Put them as the cornerstone of your quest and evaluate every criteria with it.
Have luck on that journey, and let your company become visible the way you want it to be!
Originally published at https://dops.digital.
