Finding a good web design company

[Bubzeebub]

What's the best way of finding a good professional web design company? I'm looking for one.

[Morocco]

Look and see who your potential competition would be using.

[Bubzeebub]

But I don't want to alert the competition to my presence. Plus..the competition's design people could sabotage me.

[kodaks]

The best I can think of is a search on google. I found thousands.

[yowza]

I often find a small company can do just as well as a large company for a fraction of the price. Ask your local Chamber of Commerce if they have any recommendations. Then check out the website and portfolio of the designer. For whatever company you choose, you should have analyzed several of their websites to ensure the work is up to par. Most likely, the company will not show you their bad sites in the portfolio; however, if they put their link on the bottom of each site they design, you could find these "hidden" websites by using Google's link tool: link:www.thedomain.com
This way you could see how bad your website could be, although this depends partly on the client and budget.

Good Luck.

[Bubzeebub]

Thanks

[danieljean]

When money is not an issue, I'd look for a company that is W3C compliant and uses CSS rather than tables for layout. I'd want to see sites that contain a lot of information without much clutter, load fast, are easy to use and effective (as far as sales/lead conversions). Flash on splash pages would be a deal-killer.

More than their portfolio -which too often reflects the stupid demands of some ignorant customers- their own website should reflect their design philosophy. A quick look at all the designers I could find locally revealed fewer than 10% of them that used CSS for layout- a lot of them still use Dreamweaver or other editors and are happy to use tables everywhere.

I realize some of what I said may annoy some of these webmasters, but you asked for "good professional web design company" in an ecommerce forum. While Dreamweaver et al aren't an issue for smaller sites, having clean design is essential for most ecommerce projects.

[yowza]

danieljean,

I have seen many web design companies that have bad company websites, but do excellent work.

Just because they use CSS-P on their own website doesn't mean they are any better. Maybe they used tables to have a website that is more cross-browser/platform compatible or maybe they developed their website several years ago and have been too busy to update.

You can make some perfectly clean websites with Dreamweaver. I would argue that you want somebody that uses DW or a WYSIWYG editor for faster development times. I use DW to make CSS-P websites that are W3C compliant. I can develop quickly with DW then switch to code view to make necessary adjustments. Honestly, if you use DW correctly for CSS-P websites you don't need to make very many manual adjustments.

[pleeker]

What's the best way of finding a good professional web design company?

1. Find a good professional web site.
2. Ask (or figure out) who developed it.
3. Research the company to make sure this good professional web site wasn't a one-time fluke. :)

And be sure to ask the web site owner if they'd recommend their design/development shop.