Does this business seem legit?
Is this site easy to use?
Can I trust what I’m seeing?

Your website may be their first impression of your brand—and in many cases, it’s also your best chance to build a connection. That’s why web design isn’t just about looking nice. It’s about creating a digital experience that builds trust, guides users, and supports your business goals.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we design with intention. In this post, we’ll break down what makes for effective modern web design, and why it matters more than ever.

First Impressions Happen Fast

Research shows users form an opinion about your website in less than a second. That impression impacts how they perceive your credibility, professionalism, and value.

Even if you offer incredible products or services, a dated or clunky website can send potential customers running.

A clean, intuitive, and well-structured design tells users:

• You’re professional

• You care about their experience

• You’re trustworthy

Web design is about visual language—and people know the difference between a modern site and one that hasn’t been updated in years.

Core Principles of Effective Web Design

Whether you’re starting from scratch or refreshing your existing site, strong design follows a few key principles:

1. Clarity Above All

Visitors should immediately understand:

• What you do

• Who you help

• What action they should take next

Clear messaging, readable fonts, and an uncluttered layout go a long way in keeping people engaged.

2. Consistent Branding

From your logo and color palette to tone of voice and imagery, your brand should feel unified. A consistent look builds recognition and trust, especially if users are finding you through multiple channels (ads, social media, search, etc.).

3. Mobile Responsiveness

Over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t responsive—meaning it adapts seamlessly to any screen size—you’re losing visitors and damaging your SEO.

4. Fast Load Times

People won’t wait for slow pages. Optimizing images, using clean code, and choosing the right hosting environment can drastically improve your site’s speed and performance.

5. Strategic CTAs

A strong call-to-action (CTA) guides your visitors. Whether it’s “Get a Quote,” “Book a Call,” or “Shop Now,” your CTAs should be easy to spot and action-driven.

How Design Impacts SEO, Ads, and Conversions

Design isn’t separate from your other marketing efforts—it enhances them.

• A well-designed site increases the quality score of your Google Ads, which can lower your cost per click.

• Clean layouts and clear copy improve conversion rates from traffic you’re already getting.

• Google favors sites that are mobile-friendly, fast, and easy to navigate, which are all design-driven factors.

Your website is the foundation for everything you do online. For more on that, check out our post on why web design is the central hub of your online presence.

Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

Even well-meaning sites can fall into traps that turn users away. Watch out for:

• Walls of text with no visual breaks

• Confusing navigation or broken links

• Outdated styles or flash-based content

• Lack of mobile optimization

• Popups that interrupt the user experience

If your site hasn’t been refreshed in a few years, it might be time to take a closer look.

Final Thoughts: Design for Trust, Design for Growth

At its best, your website should reflect the confidence and clarity of your brand. It should guide users, encourage action, and feel effortless to navigate. That’s not just good design—it’s smart business.

Whether you’re looking to redesign your site, launch something new, or tighten up your existing brand presence, we’re here to help.

Let’s build something that works beautifully—and builds trust from the first click.

The post Why Good Web Design Builds Trust—and How to Get It Right appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Whether you’re running ads, sending email newsletters, growing your social media, or climbing the SEO ladder, all roads eventually lead to one place: your website. Here’s why exceptional web design isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity.

First Impressions Matter—A Lot

Users form an opinion about your website in just 0.05 seconds. That tiny sliver of time is enough for them to decide if they’ll stay, engage, or bounce. Clean, professional, and engaging design not only keeps visitors around but also builds trust. Poor web design, on the other hand, can make even the most legitimate business look unprofessional or outdated.

Your website is your 24/7 salesperson—it needs to look and feel the part.

Web Design as the Core of Your Digital Ecosystem

Think of your website as the central hub of your entire digital strategy:

• SEO brings users to your site through search engines.

• Paid advertising (Google Ads, social ads) directs traffic to landing pages or product offers.

• Email marketing drives subscribers to blog posts, products, or event registrations.

• Social media campaigns create buzz and push followers to engage deeper via your website.

• Content marketing lives primarily on your site—blog posts, case studies, service pages, and more.

If your web design is clunky, slow, or hard to navigate, all those strategies underperform. A great website makes everything else work better.

Key Elements of Effective Web Design

A well-designed website should do more than look good—it should convert. Here are some key elements that separate good web design from great:

1. Responsive & Mobile-First Design

Over 60% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Your website needs to look and work flawlessly across screens of all sizes. Mobile-friendly design isn’t optional—it’s critical for both user experience and SEO rankings.

2. Clear Navigation

Users need to find what they’re looking for in just a few clicks. A clean, intuitive structure helps guide visitors through your site, increases time on page, and boosts engagement.

3. Speed & Performance

A slow website frustrates users and tanks your SEO. Speed optimization—from image compression to smart hosting—is essential for retention and ranking.

4. Conversion-Driven Layout

Your site should naturally guide users toward key actions—contacting you, booking a service, or making a purchase. Strong CTAs (calls-to-action), strategically placed, can make all the difference.

5. Consistent Branding

Your visuals, tone, and messaging should reflect your brand at every touchpoint. Web design is your opportunity to make your brand identity shine through—through color, typography, imagery, and voice.

The Role of Web Design in Your Marketing Funnel

Your marketing funnel—awareness, consideration, conversion—relies on your website at every stage.

• Attract new users with search-optimized content and landing pages.

• Engage them with valuable info, testimonials, and design that communicates trust.

• Convert them with smart layouts, easy navigation, and optimized contact forms or checkout flows.

When your web design supports the funnel, you turn casual visitors into loyal customers.

Web Design + SEO: The Dream Team

Google pays attention to how people interact with your website. High bounce rates, poor mobile experience, and slow load times can all hurt your rankings. On the flip side, strong web design increases engagement and dwell time, which sends positive signals to search engines.

Also, design supports technical SEO—site architecture, internal linking, and schema markup all benefit from well-thought-out layouts and structure.

Web Design as a Long-Term Investment

A great website doesn’t just help you today—it sets you up for future growth. As your business scales, your website should evolve with it. That means designing with flexibility and future-proofing in mind.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we don’t just build beautiful websites—we design strategic digital hubs that grow with your brand, convert your visitors, and amplify every marketing dollar you spend.

Final Thoughts

In a digital-first world, your website isn’t just a part of your business—it is your business. Whether you’re building your first site or looking to upgrade, investing in high-quality web design is one of the smartest moves you can make.

Let your website be more than a placeholder. Make it a powerful, central engine for all your marketing efforts.

Ready to build something amazing? Contact Blue Shift Web Services and let’s create a website that works as hard as you do.

The post Why Web Design Is the Central Hub of Your Online Presence appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

For most businesses, this is not easy. Creating and maintaining a website requires time, effort, and resources. But that does not mean that it requires a huge budget. If done properly, your website will help you stay top of mind and tops in your respective industry.

1. Where to Start?

Before you start building your website, you should have a very clear idea of what you want to build and how you want to build it. You also need to think about the specific goals that your website should achieve. A business website can generate traffic, leads, and sales. If the goals of your website align with your business goals, your website can greatly contribute to the growth of your business.

2. Look Trustworthy

Your website should reflect you as a legitimate business. It can only happen when you provide emotional or credible connections needed to earn trust. If the users know who they are doing business with, they are more confident to buy from you. Put pictures, videos, success stories as well as your philosophy. All these details make you look more human and more trustworthy.

3. Be Unique

The internet is a big place. There are hundreds of businesses that are competing for user attention through their websites. If your website has generic or boring content, they are not going to stay on your website for long.

If you tell your unique story and stand out through factors like price, customer service, and your contributions, your website will stand out.

4. Focus on Usability and User Experience

Design your website according to the needs of your users. If you are a home décor business, land your users on the page where they can see images of your work. If you sell a product or a service, make sure that your users get to their required page with the least effort.

Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. These days, everyone is searching for online businesses on smartphones. If your website is non-responsive, it won’t even show up in the search results.

5. Don’t Forget SEO

SEO offers greater searchability and visibility of your business website. If you optimize your website through good on-page and off-page SEO techniques, your website will rank higher in search results. An organic search is very important for introducing your business and engaging your customers. People make a buying decision after reading online reviews and comparing a business with another. SEO impacts the buying cycle in a very positive way. When done right, it means more trust from the visitors and more sales.

7. Use Analytics

You must regularly analyze your website statistics through applications like Google Analytics. These applications enable you to measure user engagement and improve your website. For example, if you find a blog post popular with the website users, you can understand that your target customers want to know more about this topic. You can create subsequent posts to drive engagement.

Key Takeaway

Good business websites provide better user experience and prove to be an important tool in branding. It is also important to understand and use analytics and user feedback to optimize and improve your website over time.

Blue Shift Web Services is a dedicated website design company located in Central Florida. We build beautiful websites that are optimized to convert visitors to sales. Contact us to learn more.

The post How to Create a Successful Business Website appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

First, we’ll talk about search engine optimization. Search engine optimization literally relies on your ability to be found organically. Things that account for this are pages on your website, backlinks from directories and platforms, and your Google My Business listing. SEO is a major aspect of digital marketing and is the most long lasting. As a long term strategy, you will not see the results right away. Generally, changes in strategy will reflect around a couple of months. However, even though that’s what I’ve seen it can take shorter or longer. There is no set in stone time frame for search engine optimization, and the algorithm for Google, Bing, and such are always changing and are never fully disclosed. For example, Google has over 250 variables in their algorithm currently.

In order to strengthen your website, make sure to have as many backlinks as you can. Backlinks are simply links from other sites directing to your site. Common backlinks are social media pages, directory listings, and client/portfolio pieces. If you guest post or have news articles that mention your business, those are also counted towards your SEO.

That leads us to our next step of social media. Social media is an amazing way to connect with your clients overall. Whether they’re interacting with your content, leaving reviews, or just watching what you’re posting, they’re helping to strengthen your online presence. Linking back to your site from your posts and profiles is a great way to direct your marketing traffic to the core of your online presence. You can use blog posts and relevant pages help your followers find what they need on your website.

The next topic is paid ads. Paid ads refers to search engine marketing like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising (formerly AdWords and Bing Ads) and social media marketing like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Pinterest Ads, and LinkedIn Ads. This is the most important place to focus on ensuring that you’re linking your traffic to relevant posts. For example, if you post an ad about tile flooring, but link them to the page about carpet, you paid for someone to leave your site without making a purchase. It’s important to take that into consideration when writing your ad copy as well.

My favorite way to describe digital marketing and online presence is that it is a web. At the center you have your website, and you have several branches that connect to it. These are your marketing strategies: SEO, Social Media, Paid Ads, Graphic Design, Print Ads, etc. The more branches connecting to your center the stronger your presence is.

Hopefully this four part series has helped you when it comes to your website. If you’re looking to get started with web design for your business, check out our great packages. For the previous posts in this Website 101 series please click below:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

The post Website 101 | Part 4 appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Why You Should Keep Your Site Updated

First, we will discuss why you should continuously tend to your website. The number one reason is that it shows google that you are alive. Every time you post to or update your site and Google crawls your site to see it, it shows them the follow:

• You’re active. Your site having recent updates and new content shows Google that your business is still open and running.
• You are an authority in your field and you care about providing useful information and therefore you’re serious about your business. Useful content refers to posting what people are looking for and that they care about. We touched on this in Website 101 Part 2: Content, which is the second part of this series.
• You’re focused on the security of your site. Just like your phone updates, platforms and plugins like WordPress and WooCommerce have regular updates that must be installed periodically This updates tend to be fixes for various bugs in the code or issues that can inhibit the overall security and functionality of your site.

Do’s and Don’ts of Website Updating

Now that you’ve gained some insight on why you should make sure to update your website, the next section will be covering various do’s and don’ts of updating your website.

Do’s 

• Test your updates before making them live on your server.
  • This is VITAL as some updates could have unseen/uncaught bugs that can literally BREAK your site completely.
  • Most people tend to leave their updates to automatically install. Doing this saves time, energy, and doesn’t require you to actually do anything. However, doing this doesn’t allow you to catch broken updates before they hit your live server and your visitors eyes.
  • If there is a site break due to an update (like the recent WordPress 5.5 update that broke thousands of themes due to the removal of an older javascript library), it can really hurt your wallet getting it fixed due to the time and coding and such that will go into fixing it. It’s better to do it before hand and save all the hastle.
• Write unique, keyword/phrase focused content.
  • We covered that in depth in Part 2.
  • As a quick reminder though – unique content is very important because plagiarism will get your rankings hit devastatingly hard. You’ll drop in the rankings very noticeably, you will no longer be seen as a leader or authority in the industry in the eyes of Google, and it can hinder your growth in the future even if you do start writing unique content regularly.
  • To boost your rankings each page and post should have a specific keyword or phrase that is the main topic of said content. This helps Google know what you are writing about, what people should search to find you, and how relevant you are to related keywords and phrases.
• Keep It Consistent
  • Consistency is key when it comes to posting not just on your site but anywhere online too.
• Hire someone to do it for you.
  • Many business owners don’t have time or knowledge to take on the daunting tasks of consistently and frequently updating their sites. It can be hard for them to learn how to update websites, especially when it comes to code based updates, so hiring an agency to do so for you can definitely help your company grow online.
  • For example, our website maintenance package includes hosting, backend updates, content updates, security, and backups. These are all useful services that can help you keep your site updated.

Don’ts

• Leave your site to auto update
  • As mentioned above, leaving your site to auto update can result in site breaking errors that will really hurt your online presence.
• Forget to update your website
  • As a counterpart to the aforementioned issues, just leaving your website without updates can open you up to a variety of security issues from having outdated code.
• Plagiarize everything on your site
  • As mentioned before, this is a big no-no and should be avoided at all costs.
• Take on more than you can handle
  • When updating your site content, it is possible to be overzealous and want to update every single day with new content. However, if you are not able to keep this up consistently, it can hurt you overall. Come up with a realisitic posting schedule, and increase as need be. For example, if you start updating your site once a month, you need to maintain that forever. If you start every other week, you wouldn’t be able to drop back down to once a month without experiencing a dip in the rankings.
• Keyword Stuff
  • This used to be a valid way to boost your rankings by stuffing random keywords into your website. However, Google has cracked down majorly on this and it does the opposite now. If you are keyword stuffing, Google will penalize you.

Website Updating Ideas and Advice

Finally, I’ll leave you with some ideas to keeping your website updated frequently and consistently. What you’ll need is a designated calendar (electronic or paper) to keep your posting schedule in check.

Find Your Posting Schedule

Pick a realistic posting schedule, for us, it’s once a week. I usually suggest starting at every other week for my clients, to let them get a feel for what they can handle. The next step is going to be where you do your first line of research. Look up your industry and see when the best time of the week and the best time of the day to post is. You’ll need to play around based on your specific audience but this will give you a starting point. For example, our industry’s best time to post is on Monday at around 10AM or 1PM. We actually see the best interactions on Tuesday at 12PM. Another example is that schools see a distinctly lower level of interactions on the weekends compared to the posts during the week.  Once you’ve decided place reminders in your calendar to make sure you keep it consistent.

Determine Your Content

The next step is to determine your content. For example, you can blog as this is the most common way to update your website with new content regularly. You can rotate through various broad topics in order to get the most out of your strategy. For me, I’ll generally post about SEO, Social Media, Web Design, and then a miscellaneous topic  and rotate through them. However, I also decide if I have a lot of information about one topic, I’ll break it up into  a series like this one. You can also have various types of pages that you update. Some of my clients have special deals each month and use that as the “update” for their site. You can also add testimonials that you get from Facebook, Google, Angie’s List, etc. Other ideas include updating your gallery, portfolio, events, and the like.

Conclusion

Hopefully this installment in the series helps you out! Be sure to read the other parts of the Website 101 series, to really learn all you need to know as a business owner. Looking to get a website? Look no further, check out our web design packages here. If you’ve already got a website and need someone to keep it updated, check out our website maintenance package and get started today!

The post Website 101: Part 3 appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

So first, ask yourself who your ideal client is. Why would they need your product or service? I will use ourselves, Blue Shift Web Services, as an example. Our ideal client is a person who owns their own business or makes the marketing decisions in their business team.They need our services to get their business out there online and have the best image of themselves put first. Once you’ve figured that out, the next step will be to determine the keywords that you want to target, both locally and generally. For us, that is Melbourne, FL web design and Brevard County SEO. You can see these phrases used multiple times around the website in key places like titles, headings, alt text, and links.

After determining what content you need on your site, it’s time to determine the pages that you have on your site. Each page should have a minimum word count of 500. This will enable you naturally use your keywords and phrases an adequate amount of times to give you the most optimal chance of ranking high on the google search result pages The average website has five pages: home, about, services/shop, contact, and blog.Your home page will have the most content as it serves as a preview to the rest of your pages. For example, if you have the normal five pages, your home page would generally have a slider or something equivalent to provide announcements or notifications about deals and specials, a small paragraph from the about page, a bit about your services/products/shop, a section for your contact information, and a section for your most recent or popular blogs pieces. Other pages you might need based on your company could be a FAQ, gallery, portfolio, testimonials, team member bios, partners, events, and so on.

Once you’ve got your pages all figured out, it’s time to sit down and properly write the content to go on your site. It’s important to know where the content will go in the layout before writing most of this content so that you’re not impeding the formatting and layout of your theme and web design. When writing your content, you’ll want to keep SEO (search engine optimization) in mind. Use your keywords and phrases in the headings that separate your various sections to let Google know what your website is primarily about. Make sure to link to similar or relevant pages on your website and on resource websites to increase your SEO rankings. For example, I’ve linked to the first blog post in this series, landing pages that are relevant to what I’m writing about, and services that I offer! This keeps users on your site and shows Google that you’re an authority on your topic.

Beyond that, you can also hire a copywriter to free up your time and possibly give it better quality and a sales voice that works. We are a full service digital agency that offers everything in regards to marketing from web design to copywriting. If you’re ready to put your best foot forward online, reach out today and get started.

The post Website 101: Part 2 appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Before hiring a professional web designer, you should ask yourself several questions regarding the project. First: do you have a deadline? If you have a short timeframe to have the website completed, then a professional web designer is the way to go. There is no learning curve that you have to worry about when hiring a developer. However if you don’t need the website quickly, then you could opt for the do it yourself route. The next question to ask yourself is “what are the required elements of the site”. This means to ask yourself “Do I need a photo gallery for my speaking events or as a portfolio display?”. If you answer yes to any of these mandatory features questions,, you’ll want to revisit your theme search criteria.

When comparing designers and agencies, it’s important to look at their portfolio. If they don’t have their portfolio readily available, be sure to reach out to them and request at least two examples of their previous work. However, remember that these are businesses, they are agencies. Do not ask for resumes. While you are hiring them, it is not right to treat them as employees. Also, you want to be open minded and respect that your agency that you hired is more knowledgeable about marketing and web design and will suggest things only to make your site better for your customers, you, and Google.

After choosing your agecny, it’s important to make sure that you both are on the same page regarding the build and everything that it entails. You’ll also want to make sure that you will own the website, are able to make changes on said website, and where the site is hosted after the design is complete.

Here at Blue Shift Web Services, you own your site outright, we provide a thorough training at launch so that you know how to manage your site yourself, and offer a maintenance package which includes hosting if you’d like to let us handle your site for you. In addition to this, our simple web design process allows you to have a website complete as quickly as two weeks. Everything can be handled online as well, making our services convenient for even the busiest business owners.Get started today and learn more about our web design packages here: web design service.

The post Website 101 – Part 1 appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Multi-Page Website

The first thing we will discuss today is that your website should NOT have only one page. It’s important for SEO and user experience to have more than one page with quality content. Having all of your information on a single page can negatively impact your user experience on the website by causing them to need to scroll endlessly to find information that they are looking for.

Headings + Subheadings

Headings and subheadings are vital elements on a website that help with a clear message, search engine optimization, and overall organization of a website.

Internal Links + Backlinks

Links are the foundation of your online presence as they create the web of your online presence. Having quality links into, out of, and within your website is the way to strengthen your presence.

Images

Your website should contain quality, unique images that aren’t used around the internet if possible. This gives google more to index you for, and unique imagery or your visitors to see.

Branding + Contact Information

Your logo, contact information, and social media profiles are important to have throughout your website. You can put these in either the header or footer so that they’re always available for the visitor to find. Other branding items include your favicon and your colors.

Ways to Communicate

There are many great tools for you to integrate into your site to enable communication with your visitors. The best of which are chat bots and live chat boxes. You can connect these to a phone and respond in real time to visitors. A contact form is another way to enable communication quickly.

What’s the Next Steps?

It’s important to make the visitor understand what to do next in the process. Whether it’s to make a call or fill out a form, you should have clear call to actions, navigations, and wording to make the next step minimally confusing.

Trust Building Elements

Brand trust is a big topic nowadays. It’s important to have your visitors trust your experience, expertise, products, quality, etc. Some ways to do that are to add testimonials from previous customers, add a gallery or portfolio of previous work, and use case studies to your advantage.

Updated Content

Content is key when it comes to SEO and being at the forefront of your visitors’s minds. Keeping your website updated through a blog or through updating the ontent on your site with new services, deals, or products.

If you need help getting your website up to par or for keeping it updated, reach out today! We’re here to help with every step of marketing from branding to building websites and online presence, to maintain your marketing strategy.

The post 30 Must Have Items in Your Business’s Website appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Contact Information

Your website should have every possible method of contact established on your site. Your phone number, email address, physical address (or addresses if you have multiple offices), fax number, social media platforms, and a contact form (that send you an email). This gives your customers more of a chance to contact you in order to get more information.

Services

When it comes to services, it’s best to have your services with a description of what is included. You want to strive for each service that you offer to be listed on your website. For example, we have web design, SEO, all the different types of paid ads that we do, and all the types of graphic design that we do. This helps us target more keywords and get found by more people.

Prices

When it comes to prices, not every business can share the prices due to different factors. However, if you’re able to put a “starting at” price, it definitely helps in conversions as it gives users an idea of what they would be spending with you. On our website, we have our pricing structure open so you can determine a rough estimate quickly.

Product Descriptions

If you have a product-based business you definitely need to have descriptions for each product. You should strive for 350-400 words per product. Describe the product in as much detail as possible including material, colors, size, country of origin, etc.

About Us

The about us page is often the second-most visited page on your entire website. People want to know who they are doing business with, so sharing a bit about yourself (and why you have your business) with a picture of you smiling is a great way to capitalize on that traffic. You can also include testimonials on the page.

Additional Information

• Each page should have a minimum of 500 words.
• Your home page should include snippets of the other pages, while the other pages serve as extended content on the topic.
• Use statistics and graphics to help build trust and reliability for your brand and business.
• Break up your text with proper formatting.
  • Don’t have an intimidating wall of text with no variation. This can quickly deter a user from staying on your page and moving to the next stage of your sales funnel.
  • Use headings, images, and lists to break up the text into easily digestible segments.
• All of your content should be directed at your ideal client/customer.

I hope this information can help you improve your website’s content and increase your conversions. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out through our contact form or our social media platforms. If you’re looking for help with web design, check out our packages!

The post Website Must Haves – Content appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

1. Portfolio 
2. Budget 
3. References/Reviews
4. Their Website
5. Communication
6. How Knowledgeable They Are
7. Willingness to Teach
8. Locality/Language
9. Niche is Negligible.
10. WordPress (WooCommerce) or Shopify only. 

Web Designer Portfolio

Okay, so first off we’re going to talk about the portfolio. When hiring a developer you should always ask to see their portfolio. This will help you to see what kind of work they have done in the past and gauge what they will be able to do for you in the future. When looking at their portfolio, it is not necessary for you to see a website in your specific niche or industry. The great thing about web design is that the bones are all the same no matter what the content looks like. When looking through their portfolio you will want to look at the layout. You want to make sure that they can design a mobile-friendly website and that it’s not going to look poorly on smaller devices. 

Web Design Prices/Budget

The next thing you want to look at is their pricing. Does their pricing meet your budget? Does their pricing reflect the quality? Is it a good deal? Is it too good to be true? Or does the pricing look to be too high compared to the quality? The answers to these questions will tell you a lot about what you can expect in terms of quality, expertise, professionalism, and reliability. 

Web Design References and Reviews

The third thing that you want to know is their reviews and references. So when it comes to hiring a web developer, you’ll want to see either their reviews or their references. You should look for reviews when working with an actual agency, whereas you should look for references when it comes to freelance web designers. If you see a portfolio then you are good to go for seeing what they can do, and might not need to go further into requesting reviews/references.

A Web Designer’s Website

You should see their website. Their website will reflect not only their knowledge but their skill and their style. You’ll want to make sure that you are impressed with their website before hiring them to make your website. For more information on web design essentials, check out our checklist.

Communication with a Web Designer

Communication is a really big deal when it comes to any business relationship. You should make sure that the person you are hiring is willing to have open communication throughout the entirety of the business relationship and throughout the entirety of the project. You should want them to have the willingness to respond quickly and respectfully and ensure that they have multiple modes of contact so that in the event of an emergency you can reach them.

Is Your Web Designer Knowledgeable?

The next thing you want to know is how knowledgeable they are you’ll want to ask them some specific questions to gauge how well they know the subject matter in this case web design. You’ll want to ask them about the different platforms, possibly what language they are comfortable coding in such as PHP and JavaScript. You’ll also want to see if they are knowledgeable in other aspects of digital marketing that tie into web design such as search engine optimization and social media integration. 

Will Your Web Developer Teach You?

The next thing is that you should hire someone who is willing to teach you. Not necessarily teach you how to code but teach you enough to have an understanding of how your website will work and the things that go into the web design, such as search engine optimization, page layout, and plug-in integration. 

Is Your Web Developer Local?

Another thing that you’ll want to take into consideration when you’re hiring a web developer is their locality and their language. Having a developer who is close to you and does not have a language barrier will save you time and money. Hiring someone in another country or in another time zone can hinder communication. 

Niche is Negligible

Now the next thing is niche. Having a niche developer is unnecessary. Coding is all the same no matter what industry the website is for. the bones are the same. While there are some cases where having a niche developer could be beneficial such as certain technologies that need to be integrated such as IDX for real estate or HIPAA for the health industry, the majority of the time you do not need a specialized web developer.

Web Design Platforms

The final thing we will discuss is that you should only invest in a web developer that uses WordPress, Shopify, or from scratch code. this is because most drag-and-drop builders are not beneficial for SEO, performance, and flexibility, therefore you should not invest a ton of money in someone who specializes in these drag-and-drop builders. Many of the biggest businesses use WordPress or Shopify to build their website. There are also times where you may need a from-scratch developer however the majority will only need someone who works with WordPress or Shopify.

Hopefully these ten things will help you when you’re choosing your web designer.

The post 10 Things You Should Know When Hiring a Web Developer. appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.