Business owners should always be cautious when considering hiring a web designer. There are a lot of web designers out there, but only a few are truly qualified. The first step for many business owners is typically to ask the web designer for a portfolio of their previous work. At this stage, some web designers will get hired simply based on the presentation of their portfolio. This, however, is never enough to truly qualify a web designer. The phrase ‘their work speaks for itself’ doesn’t apply here.

Instead, business owners should create a checklist and ask the web designer if he/she can manually write HTML code, work with programming languages like JavaScript, create meta-tags to optimise websites for search engines, create forms, experiment with interactive content and work with websites in a secure server environment. The web designer should be able to prove that they are competent in all these areas. Any web designer worth his weight in code will have all these skills and many more.

To further verify the web designer as a qualified professional it’s worthwhile to quiz them on what programs they use to create websites. Although it can be said that quality websites can be created with cheap software and poor websites can be created with expensive software, it’s not really a rule to adhere to when qualifying a web designer. The truth is that very few professional web designers’ use programs like Microsoft FrontPage, so if this comes up in conversation, it’s a good idea to ask why they use that program, instead of something more advanced, like Adobe Dreamweaver. If the web designer comments that he/she works only with plain text editors, this can actually be considered a great talent, because it means they write all their code by hand. This shows that the web designer has a very thorough understanding of web design.