COPY STILL IN PROGRESS. To be completed shortly :-)
If you’re searching for a website designer for a refresh of your existing website or starting from scratch, here are 10 critical factors your website designer needs to perform for you:
Criteria #1: Own your assets
This is a cousin to the topic of website design, but needs to be covered.
Concept: Own your domain registrar account (eg GoDaddy, Namecheap) and own your hosting account/service. These 2 services should NEVER be in your designer or webmaster or SEO’s account.
Rationale: Here’s the analogy: If your designer gets hit by a bus or goes AWOL or when you part ways, would you want to be held hostage to the complexities of claiming back control of your assets?
Action: Today, no – right now, check if you own control of these two accounts. If not, get control of it.
Criteria #2: High-Performing Yet Affordable Hosting Service
Concept: Host your website on a high-performing hosting service that offers great customer service but yet affordable.
Rationale: Speed matters and I’ll detail this below. Imagine your host server to be a speedboat. The more passengers they stuff into the speedboat, the heavier the load and the slower the boat. The one service I recommend to clients these days is Siteground’s WordPress hosting service. (Don’t host at GoDaddy, please – they excel at domains, but they bite with hosting.)
Action: Search for your domain at https://whoer.net/checkwhois and you’ll find out who your host is under “Nameserver”. If your designer wants to host your website, don’t do it. Why? Look at Criteria #1. Instead, have them build your website on your own hosting account.
Criteria #3: Scalable & Non-Proprietary Framework
Concept: Ensure your designer builds your website on a framework (eg WordPress) that is scalable for growth (ie alot more pages) & performance, and it’s non-proprietary to their company, which means many more developers/designers can pick up the pieces if the first one is no longer on your project.
Rationale:
Criteria #4: Pageload Speeds
GTMetrix, Lazyload, Compressing images, Defer/Async JS/CSS
Criteria #5: Copywriting, Conversion, Call-To-Action
Criteria #6: Schema
Criteria #7: Video
Criteria #8: SEO-Friendly
Criteria #9: Mobile-Responsive and Mobile-Friendly
Criteria #10: Above-The-Fold
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