Sillybean

What to look for in a professional web designer

• Knowledge of web standards.
• A good, recent portfolio. Make sure that at least one site was done within the last calendar year.

• Someone you aren’t related to or close friends with.

Really, that’s about it. Web standards covers a lot — compliant sites tend to be accessible to the disabled (and Google counts as a blind visitor, by the way) and mostly free of browser compatibility problems. I keep harping on standards precisely because following them solves so many problems.

Think about what you want before you start looking around. (I’ll post a list of questions tomorrow that will get you started on this.) If you want a blog, hire someone who already has experience setting one up; don’t pay someone to learn if you can help it. If you want people to be able to enter contests, take quizzes, and sign up for mailing lists, hire someone who can demonstrate some database experience.

Most of the things you’ll want for your site — blogs, polls, mailing lists, etc. — are pretty standard website features. What I mean by that is not that you should get them all for free, but that there are about a zillion free ones out there. Your designer should look at the options available, pick the one that suits your needs, and install it for you — not charge you for a week’s worth of expensive coding work so he can reinvent the wheel. If you ask for something you’ve seen on dozens of other sites and your designer tells you he’s creating it from scratch, smack him with a clue-by-four.

Now, if the problem is that none of the free gizmos out there will fit the exact scenario you’ve described, have your designer discuss what they will do before he goes off and writes something new. Maybe you can negotiate that moon you originally asked for down to a little space station, knowing that’ll save you a thousand bucks or so.

Signs of a bad designer

• Bad design. If you loathe his home page, don’t stick around just because he was recommended.
• Bad code. View the source. If it’s littered with font tags, several nested tables, and Javascript rollovers (look for lots of “onhover,â€? “onclick,â€? “onmouseout,â€? etc.), the designer is not doing things efficiently. (If you don’t know what you’re looking at when you view the source, post a link in the comments and I’ll have a look.)
• Gizmo overload. Animations, sounds, video, Flash intros… if he can’t do a site without them, he doesn’t get to work on yours.
• Marketing copy with phrases like “information superhighway.â€? No one in this business ever said that with a straight face.

• “I hand-code all my HTML.” Now we’re at the opposite end of the spectrum: this person values perfection at the expense of efficiency. It’s commendable, but not when you’re paying him by the hour. The kind of designer you’re looking for knows how to code by hand, and does so when his editor misbehaves or when hand-coding is faster than clicking through fourteen levels of dialogue boxes. But when dealing with long text passages, for example, there is absolutely no point in hand-crafting every paragraph when a decent editing program will write the basic code just fine.

Things you should require from your designer

• Accessible, standards-based, commented code. You want something another designer can understand at a glance, something you can figure out yourself if you have to. Neither the words “accessible” nor “standards-based” should add to the cost of the design. If they do, the designer isn’t doing things correctly.
• All original image files with the layers intact. Designers like to hang onto these so you have to come back to them when you want a minor change to an image. You might have to negotiate a little, but you should get these files. They’ll allow you to go elsewhere (or make changes yourself) in the future. (Get them even if you’re happy with your designer—what if he gets hit by a bus?)
• A style guide, for your reference. (“The h3 tag produces something large, red, and italicized with a gray underline. All paragraphs within the div marked “main” will be gray, not indented, and will be in a serif font such as Georgia or Times….”)
• Any known browser incompatibilities (e.g. “using a photo wider than 600 pixels will make this page explode in Internet Explorer”).
• Basic search engine optimization.

• A search engine report: which directories, date submitted, descriptions used, etc. if search engine submission is included in your designer’s services. (It usually is.)

Further reading

• Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make. Don’t be the band who wants everything done wrong.
• Bad Flash.

• The Big Web Design Details List. How to evaluate a site. A must-read.