Not all web designers are created equal. This article aims to provide you, the prospective website owner, with the information you need to make a qualified decision when it comes time to choose a web design firm.

Lets break down all web design entities into a few groups:

  • The Acquaintance
  • The Big Firm
  • The Specialist

We’ll even go as far as breaking the people who build websites into three categories for information’s sake:

  • Web Designers
  • Web Developers
  • Web Designer/Developers

Lets begin.

The Acquaintance

These days, we all know someone who has deemed himself or herself a “web designer”. It could be cousin Ralph, a friend of a friend, or perhaps even a young teenager who just got themselves a nice web design program.

Chances are, they are eager to perform web duties for anyone, and are willing to work for next to nothing. As you begin to think about having a website built for your business, this first option may seem very attractive. Before signing up, consider the following:

Quality web design is an acquired skill. Good websites are made only after building (many) bad ones. How many websites has this person built?

Websites need to work on devices besides browsers and need to be accessible to disabled persons. Are they aware of this fact, and do they know what needs to be done in order to accomplish this?

Websites call on several languages and technologies to perform correctly. Does this person know the current basic languages? HTML, XHTML, XML, Javascript?

Websites need a data-driven back end to keep information fresh. Has this person ever integrated live data into their pages? If not, updates can become costly over time.

Websites need to get finished and launched in a reasonable amount of time. Often the acquaintance will “lose steam” after beginning the project, since they usually haven’t seen enough projects through to realize the actual workload involved. Only experience can reveal how long a site will actually take to build.

The acquaintance can be a great affordable option, if they know what they are doing. If they don’t have a number of LIVE websites to show you, you may want to steer clear to avoid headache and hard feelings.

The Big Firm

A safer bet for your business may be the big established firm. They’ve built tons of websites, integrated live data, and perhaps they offer hosting and other services too. This can also be an attractive option, since the big firm makes you feel a little more comfortable that your website will turn out professionally, and in a controlled amount of time. Like anything else, there are some downsides to going with the big firm, such as:

You’ll pay more. Big firms have staff and significant overhead that the customer pays for.

Lack of personal service. This isn’t always true, but many big firms have layers of communication between you and the actual people building the site. This results in slower, less direct communication and even repeat phone calls with no call backs.

Maintenance. Many big firms will try to get you into some sort of maintainence agreement for your site. Often, this becomes a something for nothing expense. If changes will be happening frequently enough on any website, you should consider instead a data-driven back end you can update yourself easily.

All and all however, the big firm can usually turn out a nice product, just be sure to review their other designs, as many as possible, so you can get a feel for the visual quality of their work.

The Specialist

The specialist is a small entity, such as myself, that offers the same services as the big firm, but at a more personal and affordable level. Usually, like myself, the specialists at one point worked for a big firm then became tired of the corporate environment, or just wanted to go into business for themselves.

Some specialists are simply more experienced acquaintances. You must carefully evaluate the skill set of any specialist. If not, you may end up with an acquaintance that is as expensive as the big firm.

Key things to look for:

Good eye for design. First visual impressions. Steer clear of designers that use distracting color combinations and other things that confuse the experience of a website.

Understanding of Client-Server programming. Make sure they know at least one of these languages: Perl, ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion or Java. If not, they won’t be able to program anything of value.

Understand the needs of today’s business website. Businesses need more than an online brochure that does nothing. Before beginning any business site, there should be a strategy in place as to how the site will play a role the business.

Understanding of web standards and basic accessibility. Just like buildings, everyone needs to get in to your website.  It's not law yet, but it will be. 

The specialist can be the best way to go for your business, but a “huge” project may be best left to the big firm, as the specialist is usually one person, sometimes with a helper or two.

Now you can hopefully get a better grasp of the practitioners you can expect to meet in the web design industry when getting ready to have your own site built. 

Taking that explanation  a step further, there are three types of web design persons:

Web Designer

Often people call themselves web designers and they may not even actual understand what the term actually refers to. The term web designer applies to someone who can design a visual layout for use on the web, but not someone who actually marks up pages using proper code. Often big firms will have a designer and a developer working together.

Web Developer

Web developers are a little more rare than designers. Developers enjoy marking up pages using HTML or XHTML, they'll emply CSS for the presentation layer, and use a database or XML documents to store inforamtion. The joining of these two is what can create a website.

Web Designer/Developer

This is the rarest breed of all, as they possess not only visual design skills, but programming and markup skills as well. Specialists are usually designer/developers though there are many exceptions. For the record, I am a designer/developer. I can create beautiful visual designs, then connect them to data sources, creating a complete package without hiring outside assistance.

Hopefully this clears up any confusion as to who would be best to hire for a project, some key items to be aware when evaluating web design entities, and clearing up some title ambiguity that exists. 

Update 11/21/2005: The PePSi Name and Pepsi Challenge phrase are both trademarked by the Psepsi Cola Co.