Choosing a Web Designer

Many small business owners struggle with deciding on how to make the right choice for designing their website. They search the web for help with their website and find that the choice is harder than they thought. Currently there are (literally) millions of websites who claim to be professional web designers. However, one must be careful in choosing the right person or people in which to trust their company image. In this article, I will attempt to categorize web designers into manageable groups, and teach the reader the difference between the types.

Web designers fall into four general categories: freelance amateur, freelance professional, Web Design Company, Web Development Firm.

Freelance Amateur

The majority of web designers you will come across, especially searching the Internet, are freelancers. That is, individuals who do web design but are not employed by a web design company. Some are self-employed professionals but most of these freelancers are amateur-hobbyist types. They find a copy of FrontPage™ came with their MS Office™ Suite. They discovered how fun it could be to make web pages so they started telling their friends that they could "design" web pages.

The "pros" of using an amateur is that they are very cheap. The "cons" are too numerous to mention, but I'll point out a few. They have no training; they have little knowledge of what makes a good website work; they do not understand HTML code or CSS but only FrontPage point and click; they do not understand general design and layout concepts and they have little real experience. The biggest reason they should be avoided for the serious businessperson, is that their work looks amateurish, which makes your company look amateurish. Who wants that?

Freelance Professional

A professional is often defined by simply being paid. People think that if you are paid for something, then you are professional. Maybe that's true in the Olympics, but for the business services world, you are not a professional until you are established and respected as one by your clients and peers. Freelancer professional web designers are a giant leap from the amateur in that they have established a portfolio of respectable work. They have some sort of qualified training and experience and they have credentials that can be verified by contacting references. They have a good reputation with their clients and other professionals. In general, a good freelance professional web designer can be good person to have doing your site. But they are hard to distinguish from the amateur when you are just searching the web.

The upside is, if you find a good one they are significantly cheaper than a web design company. But that is usually the only upside. If the budget limits you, then a freelancer will do for a small project. But anything seriously important should be left to a professional company.

Some downsides to using a freelance pro are that they are usually part-time, meaning they are limited in how much time they can devote to your project. They are also limited in what they can do for you. Most freelancers are specialists in one area and generalists in everything else. Some have no skills in anything except their one specialty and often you will have to find others to fill roles. In addition, freelancers are not always cheap although many of them are aspiring to create their own company; some are highly sought after and charge $100 per hour or more for their work. My advice here is, if you have that much to spend, go with a company that has a team of professionals to get the job done in a timelier manner.

Web Design Company

This is the next step beyond a freelance professional. The web design company offers the "whole show". They provide real project management and have pulled together a team of web experts to get a wider range of jobs done. A company can provide a much higher level of expertise in web design, programming, content development and more.

Such a company is usually very small, yet large enough to handle larger scale projects. Compared to the most highly qualified freelancer, a company has a diversity of talent and collaboration working for them. The end-result is usually a much higher quality product.

The only real drawbacks are on the one hand, the web design company is more expensive than a freelancer because there are many more people on the job. However, you get what you pay for rings true. On the other hand, for very large projects or long term development, web design companies may be too small and usually do not have the human recourses to accommodate that $500,000 contract. In the end, for serious business people looking for quality and professionalism and who can't afford the big firm, this is the way to go.

Web Development Firm

As the title implies, a web development firm is like any traditional company. They have a staff of office workers, they have owners and officers, and they have a team of talented professionals who are paid a good salary for their work. They often have a sales force that do inside and outside sales. The quality of their work goes without saying, as you could not be so well-established by doing shoddy work. These firms offer teams of very talented professionals who work on your project and get the job done in a timely and extremely efficient manner. Additionally, they usually cover all aspects of website development including marketing and advertising. They may have teams of specialists that they can deploy to your location and work in-house under a temporary contract. The possibilities are endless.

If price is not an issue and the highest quality work is necessary, then this is who you want to do the job. For smaller budget businesses, a quote from an established web development firm might knock you off your chair, but know that companies who have project requirements that reach hundreds of thousands of dollars know the score. Thus, the only real drawback for a web development firm is that they are usually very expensive. Then again, cost is relative and bigger companies like to work with bigger companies.

In summary, the choice is yours. I would recommend for the serious businessperson, that you budget a decent amount of dollars to properly design and execute a professional website. I would avoid the amateur and outsource to an individual or company with good experience and reasonable rates to create my web presence. If money were no object, then I would only deal with established firms and pay the big bucks to get the job done right and done well.

Global Business? Speak the Language and Content of Your Client

According to many sociologists, in the last decades we have been experiencing a "sea change" in several fields of humanity, from technology, science, economy to politics. This huge shift they talk about is called "Globalization" and it has seriously affected our lifestyle, our habits, the entire social structure and hence the way we deal with the contemporary world.

As a matter of fact, our world seems to have been experiencing a sort of time-space compression since 1972, as a famous anthropologist and geographer, namely David Harvey, affirmed in his famous book The condition of Postmodernity: An inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (HARVEY, David, The condition of Postmodernity: An inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, 1992). Think out to the rapid flow of information triggered by the ICT revolution that nowdays enables us to send a message to the other side of the world in real time through "a click on the palm of our hand". Think out to the increased flexibility of the means of transports thanks to the technological advances that enable us to move through the world in a matter of hours. All these improvements have made the world get smaller and smaller in a metaphorical sense so that today in the business field organizations are no longer bounded by their geographical location.

All of a sudden, their markets have no limits at all and they can start looking at new opportunities overseas where they could not even imagine going only some years ago. In other words, what happens is that they become global and, as they achieve this new status, their new customer targets are no longer exclusively composed of local clients. New global segments emerge that share more or less the same lifestyle thanks to globalization. For instance, the Chinese women of the emerging middle-class act like and identify themselves with the American women.

Companies willing to internationalize have a desperate need to start off from internationalizing their communication ... but, would not it be enough to use English for their foreign communication ?? Perhaps, the jury is still out on this issue but No ! We definitely think No and we are going to show you why below.

Multilingual communication: fundamental for going global in business

In today's global economy multilingual communication is an essential tool to succeed in business because:

• Buyers in every country are increasingly demanding products or services described in their own language
• companies that realize the point above too late inevitably lose market shares and 33% reduction in long-term profitability of the product life cycle on average, according to McKinsey & Co
• companies' global brands decline in value if they speak a non-local language

Unfortunately, it seems that many organizations are failing to address their efforts towards localization and translations along with creating relevant and valuable multilingual digital content. If they do it, most of the time is just an accidental process without yet a carefully considered plan nor relying on a well-conceivable strategy behind it.

Redefining the value of content management: towards multilingual global content management

The user, potentially interested in a product or service just just Googles it on the Internet and guess what? Among the Google's list of results, he picks out and clicks only on those delivered in his own language. This action will be repeated in any touch point of its online journey before ending up purchasing the searched product or service.

Therefore, what a business would better do is to start redefining the value of its content management and upgrade it to a multilingual global content management. The later drives the global customer experience, increases the customer satisfaction, promotes the brand awareness, its consistency and supports the time to market goals. Moreover, since the content is a significant corporate asset, it must be managed as any other corporate asset, since it is imperative to turn it into a multilingual one and working relentlessly on its translation to the client / user's idiom.

As the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt once said:

If I'm selling to you, I speak your language. If I'm buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.

(Then we must speak German)

Although one might be induced to think that simply embedding a Google Translator plugin into his business website would do the trick, it would soon find out how short sighted this choice is. Not only would translations turn out to be of poor quality but this would also heavily affect the reputation of its business and brand.

Furthermore, a global economy is more and more requiring not only a multilingual content but also a content which is appropriate to the targeted population. In other words, a business must meet the expectations in terms of localization and translation processes of a targeted country, otherwise even a perfectly translated message may sound weird for a native speaker.

For instance, a Spanish firm could use in its website an expression such as

llevar el gato al agua - to take the cat to the water

to highlight that they have fulfilled a very complex task in a particular job, a feat.

Clearly, the English translation does not convey the same meaning of the original Spanish one and a web user would feel puzzled when reading this expression. As a consequence, that business would not be perceived as professional and its reputation would soon break down into pieces. It goes without saying that the user / potential customer would dash off to another business website and, sometimes, buy a product or service from the competitor.