When picking the best web development company, you need to know what you are looking for. At Chameleon Communications, we have been implementing great websites for companies as part of our digital marketing services for years. Here are the three ways to choose a solid Internet development company.
Align Your Business Objectives With The Right Firm
The first basic question to ask is what you want to accomplish with your Internet presence. Once you know this, you should select a web design company that understands your digital marketing goals and how to work within your budget & scope.
Knowing how your website will generate leads is key. Additionally, examining and understanding how your sales processes work can also aid and guide you in knowing and understanding the optimal technology requirements to efficiently and best to position what you have or want to have in place.
Ultimately, the goal is to have your requirements help you effectuate what’s required; however, this can lead to an impasse of chicken-or-egg. And that’s where a professional can step in, take a look under the hood, and offer suggestions to bridge the gap between not knowing what you don’t even know, and formulating a plan to realize efficiency and client satisfaction gains.
Once you’ve reached a solid understanding of where you’re going, the next question is asking the technology related questions to form a clear roadmap of direction.
- Identify Your Technology Needs
A simple meeting between yourself and the web development consultant can determine if your requirements can easily be satisfied through a simple brochure website, or what’s required is greater functionality. Knowing this helps determines the depth of ability you will require from your web development company.
Many web design firms do not even have a solid working knowledge of HTML, CSS, languages such as Javascript, PHP, etc. You want a development firm that can navigate past the basic front-end web design. They should be familiar with the “back-end” technologies such as databases, scripts, and application programming interfaces, (APIs).
These technical skill sets are not always known right out of the gate. You need to drill into this with your web development firm. This leads to our final insight as you venture into the web development firm quest.
While it may not appear rare, the vastly different skill sets required to put it all together in a way that turns your website from an expense to a marketing asset driving sales often rests with who is putting the pieces together, and it’s not a common basket of skills with any one person.
- Ask The Right Questions
As we have mentioned, before you ask questions of your potential web development company, you need to ask your own questions:
- What functionality do I need right now?
- What do I need in a website to grow?
- Who will manage and/or edit the content on the site?
- What websites do I like?
- Go out and get a selection of designs
Now you are ready to ask your potential web developer the right questions. To learn more about how to ask the right questions read our blog post 5 Questions To Ask A Web Development Firm.