How To Identify A Quality Website Design Company

The website design industry is highly competitive with many different businesses all-competing for your clientele.  This provides a great buyers market for web design services and you should utilize this buyer’s advantage to secure the right company for you.

When choosing the right website design company you should consider the following:

1) How Many Questions Do They Ask:  A website design company that asks many questions about your business, customers, products and goals is more likely to produce a web design you are happy with.  When they don’t ask you many questions it is highly probably they will be using templates to design your website from.

2) View Their Complete Portfolio:  Ensure that you request to view their complete portfolio and in conducting the review note the use of colours and styles in their design.  It the website design company appears to use only one style or limited colours then gauge whether these colours and styles suit your business.

3) Do They Have A Plan:  A quality web design company will have a planning document which walks you through the process of building your website.  The more comprehensive the plan the more likely you are to be working with a professional company.

4) Ask Them About SEO:  While the actual website designer does not need to know SEO it’s important that someone within the company can clearly articulate the benefits of SEO.  All website designs now need basic SEO integration to ensure traffic generation and success.

5) Call Their Recent Clients:  Choose 2 recent clients of the web design company to call and ask them about their experience.  Specifically find out how smooth the process was and any potential sticking points you should know about.

6) Who Owns the Copyright:  This can be a major problem with some website design companies as they wish to maintain copyright on all their work.  Unfortunately this is not what you desire, you want to own full copyright to the materials produced for you.

7) Set the Deadline:  Prior to engaging the website design company makes sure you tell them of your set deadline of delivery.  Ask them if they can confidently deliver on time and meet your targets.  If they are unable to then you need to find a company that will.

8) Source File Access:  A quality website design company will give you full unrestricted access to the source files which run your site.  By having this access you can always have another designer edit your files rather than engaging the same company.

When you find a website design company that fits these major criteria you are most probably working with a quality company.  It’s important to remember that you need to like the company you are working with so ensure their personality style meets yours!

Google Panda Update – How It Affects Search Engine Optimisation

As you know Google is the primary search engine that all businesses are aiming to dominate and recently a major update has been released affecting all websites. It is not uncommon for Google to release updates as they are constantly improving the way they rank sites, as a business owner it is your responsibility to ensure your website keeps track with those updates.

At Sigma InfoTech our teams of experts have studied the latest update called the “Panda Update” and identified three major changes to Search engine optimisation in the update you need to understand:

SEO Major Change 1: Poor Quality = Poor Results

In the Panda Update Google changed the algorithm it uses to index and rank sites so that it discounted low quality, low value sites. Sites that have unique, valuable content will be ranked higher then sites that have low value, duplicate content.

No longer can a cheap, duplicate content site rank well in the search engine you must invest in building quality sites with well-written and well-researched content. This is not something new though as at Sigma InfoTech we have always told our clients they need quality content and quality sites to get long-term search engine results.

Search Engine Optimisation Major Change 2: Become Google’s Content Partner

The second major change in the Panda Update is Google has stated publicly they will reward trusted, high quality sites. It is important right now to ensure you are optimizing your site effectively and within Google’s terms of service. If you are doing this then you will be rewarded by Google, here is the direct quote from Google:

“Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

When creating your website ensure you are producing content and pages on your site that reflect what Google and your visitor requires. Sigma InfoTech clients should be elated with this news as all of your websites are built on this principle.

Website Optimisation Major Change 3: Win-Win-Win

An out-dated but often used technique for Search Engine Optimisation is to write content designed to rank well in search engines without considering your readers. The “Panda Update” is forcing website publishers to provide content that is “Win-Win-Win”.

Win 1: Provide content that readers and visitors want to read and find valuable

Win 2: Provide content that is well search engine optimised and easily indexed by Google

Win 3: Rank well because you have achieved your visitors and Google’s goals

Simply put, the Panda Update means website owners who are making an investment in quality content, quality web design and website design quality coding will be rewarded. Google is trying to improve the quality of their search engine results and by following their simple rules you will start to rank well.