Get A Guarantee For Your Website Design

Posted on by Bob Ottaway

Sometimes in the rush to hire a website designer, the thought about what happens after the site is up on the Net is never considered. This can be troublesome because there is rarely a website launch where there aren’t some pages or features that don’t need fixing.

So here are a few good rules to remember when hiring a website design company:

  1. Determine what content management system (CMS) they are going to use. If you personally are going to want to be making content changes to the site, make sure that your website designer is going to use a popular and easy-to-use CMS like WordPress. You want to have a CMS that is ubiquitous and features forums that will answer your questions going forward.
  2. Make sure that you will own your website and that your website designer will provide you with all of the code. You may not need it Day One, but if you ever want to change website design companies you will have to have it, and it’s always easier to get it upfront rather than chasing designers for the code.
  3. Make sure that the name and email on the domain registry is yours, not your website designer, and make sure that you have the Username and Password to renew your own domain and change hosting companies if you choose to down the road.
  4. And, now to the guarantee: a minimum of 90 days is necessary for your website design company to provide. In 90 days the site will have seen enough use that the “gremlins” will have appeared and you can ask your website design company to make the “fixes” for free. Make sure that this is written into your contract.

As a website design company that is hired to take over and redesign websites that other designers have created, we work with all of these issues first-hand. Rarely is it an easy process to get a site moved to our server for hosting and to get into the “back-end” of the site to begin to do the redesign. The old website design company may be unhappy that you are leaving them and they drag their feet in responding to your requests.

Never contract with a website design company in the interest of saving money that doesn’t allow you to own your site and domain. In reality, this is a waste of money as you are “wedded” to them forever and if you want to make changes, they keep the site, and sometimes even the domain. Talk about holding somebody up!

I hope this has been helpful. If you have any further questions, just consult my website: www.DetroitWebsiteDesign.com. We have been designing websites for almost 15 years and have faced all of the above first-hand.

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