Tips for Selecting Good Web Design and Hosting Companies

The Quality Versus Price Debate

Unless your company is worth millions of dollars, you probably have a set budget with which to pay for the whole package.

Putting together a website involves two different services: website design and website hosting. Website design involves the creation of the graphic images, the construction of the pages, and the completion of any necessary programming for interactive features. Website hosting is the storage and serving up of your website’s files on an Internet Service Provider’s computer. The two parts may or may not be handled by the same company, depending on the capability of the company you select. There is a vast array of pricing differences for these two services, even within the same market area.

Both website design and website hosting are important. If you skimp on one or the other, it is very often noticeable.

Your website gives the public its first impression of your business. Therefore, unless you want to give people the impression that you are a shoddy outfit, it is advisable not to cut corners on the website design. Yet, it needn’t be extravagant. It can still look pleasing to the eye without including all of the state-of-the-art bells and whistles. This publication will help you know what to look for selecting a design firm.

The hosting is usually transparent to the web visitor unless it is very slow. Make sure that your web hosting company has the bandwidth to serve up your website without undue delay. Internet Service Providers that cut corners by having their web servers and all of their dialup users on the same line sometimes have slowdowns during periods of high Internet usage. You don’t want slow response times turning your customers away, so ask some questions of the potential web hosting company. This publication will go over some of the hidden costs of web hosting.

Evaluating Design Firms

The Portfolio

One of the most important criteria in selection of a website design firm is the company’s portfolio. How many websites have they designed, and what do they look like? It is extremely important to get a list of website addresses which the company has designed, and then visit the sites. Decide whether you like the graphic designs and the mechanics of the sites.

Ask yourself some of the following questions: Do they make custom graphics (buttons, etc.) for each company? Or do they force the same look on every site they design? Do they use mostly colored backgrounds and text rather than graphics, showing that perhaps they don’t really have the skills for true graphics production? How easy are the websites to navigate? Can you find what you’re looking for easily? Is it easy to read the text on the pages, or do they use wild backgrounds that make it impossible to read the information? Are the sites filled with links that don’t work? Is there other evidence of sloppy work, such as pages that look out of kilter, frequent misspellings, etc.? These are all important things to consider.

Graphic Design Experience

It is important to know what kind of design experience the company hires to build its websites. Of course, limited experience will usually be evident in the company’s portfolio, but if you ask for something later that they don’t have the experience to deliver, this may become more of an issue. You should select a design firm whose employees have significant training in graphic design. Some individuals and/or companies who call themselves website designers have no formal design training, but are instead people whose only experience is in using web editing software tools.

Some Internet Service Providers that say they do website design assign website construction to their techies in the back room who have absolutely no design experience. You should select a design firm whose employees have at least some significant training in graphic arts. Some individuals and/or companies who call themselves website designers have no formal design training, but are instead people whose only experience is in using web editing software tools. It’s important to find out about the people that may be assigned to work on your website.

Website Construction Experience

While graphic design experience is important, it is not the only factor in evaluating a company’s experience. It’s also important in your evaluation to find out how much website construction experience the company has. Generally speaking, the longer a company has been around, the more website construction experience they are likely to have. This is due to the fact that the process of building websites has a significant learning curve attached to it. It takes time to learn how to balance good graphic design with keeping downloading time to a minimum. Even great design credentials won’t make up for the lack of experience in website construction.

One good way to verify how long a company has been in business is to check the date that they registered their company’s domain name at the InterNIC. This almost always works because there are very few website design companies that actually predate the Internet boom. (However, for a small number of software companies, this may only show when they got an online presence.) To do this, you can use the WHOIS search tool at Network Solutions. For example, type in delaware.org and press search on the page in this link, and note the date the domain record was actually created. If the domain record creation date is yesterday, but the company says they’ve been around for two years, then they’re most likely not being truthful about their company history.

Internet Marketing Experience

Building your company a website that Is pleasing to look at, and operates smoothly is great, but it won’t do you any good at all if nobody can find it on the Internet. A good website design firm should also have plenty of Internet marketing experience, that is, ways of increasing traffic to your site by raising your company’s profile in the search engines, and other ideas for drawing visitors to your site (such as procucts with your company’s web address on them).

Website Pricing

Now that you have selected a few companies whose portfolios you admire, it’s time to get an estimate for the design and construction of your company’s website. There are as many different ways of pricing website construction as there are website designers. Some companies offer flat-rate pricing (such as by the page or by the site), while others charge an hourly rate. Be wary of flat-rate pricing for an entire website. If you have a small number of pages, flat-rate website pricing means that you will probably be overpaying. Whereas, if you have a large number of pages, the company may cut quality to keep within the time constraints they have allowed per each website construction. Pricing by-the-page may also have you overpaying, since pages are easily duplicated from a template after the design has been laid out.

The best, and fairest, pricing for a website’s construction is based on a graphic designer’s hourly rate. The amount of work varies for each individual website. However, a design firm should be able to figure out how long they will take to build you a site with the specifications that you set, and give you a written estimate from which they will not veer unless you change your specs.

Website Hosting Expenses

Many people who are in the beginning stages of planning a website get sticker shock when they find out that there is an additional cost for hosting the site. This can range from free to very expensive, depending on the quality of the hosting service.

Free Hosting Versus Paid Hosting

While there are places which will host your website for free, it is usually not advisable to use one of these for a business. Firstly, you will not have your own company domain name (i.e., yourcompany.com), but instead some long and hard-to-remember Internet address. Then too, most of these free hosting sites are supported by advertising -- boatloads of advertising. Your web visitors will be peppered with popup ads and all sorts of messages that will detract from, and potentially draw potential clients away from, your own company’s product or service.

What You’re Paying For

Most professional website hosting companies tier their prices according to the services which are included, and the disk storage space and bandwidth allocated to you, rather than, say, pricing by the page.

Some website services which usually cost extra are e-commerce and shopping baskets, for example. There are also some hosting companies which charge extra for such things as database access and video streaming. Therefore, it’s a good idea to do just a little thinking about what your company may require down the road.

Unless your company’s email storage space is included with the website space, you won’t generally need that much space for a website, since the files should be very small in order to load your website quickly. You would be surprised to know that many websites would actually fit on a floppy diskette.

Many website hosting companies allow a certain amount of downloading of your pages for free, but start charging you by the megabyte above a certain limit. This is absolutely fair, since sites that draw heavy traffic and hog the available resources should pay their fair share. Hopefully, if your website is receiving that amount of traffic, you will also be selling millions of dollars of your product or services, so you will easily be able to afford to pay for the extra bandwidth or to upgrade your service level to another tier. If you aren’t selling your product or services, however, this may become an issue (and time to reevaluate your website’s message as well!).

As stated earlier in this publication, the website hosting company should have plenty of bandwidth to serve up your site without a significant slowing during peak periods. A good test of a company’s bandwidth is to look up some sites that you know they are hosting, and visit the sites during times when there is likely to be peak Internet usage, such as when all of the kids let out of school. If the sites slow down to a crawl during these times, it is usually evidence that the web servers are sharing the same bandwidth as all of their dialup users - not good. You don’t want your company’s message to get choked off just at the time when the most people are actually using the Net! You certainly have the right to ask about bandwidth allocation for the website servers.

The Hidden Costs of Hosting

Companies putting together a website are sometimes blindsided by costs which they didn’t anticipate, and which were not mentioned by the hosting company. Some companies may sucker you in with a great monthly cost (or yearly, depending on how they bill), only to surprise you with outrageous costs for those little extras when you actually get your bill. Arm yourself with the facts about one-time fees.

One of the extra costs associated with hosting is the fee for the domain name (i.e., yourcompany.com). Be aware that the InterNIC charges a minimum fee of $35 for one year of domain name registration. An honest company will pass that cost along to you with no markup. However, there may be an additional fee for the hosting company to actually get the name working on its servers, sometimes termed a "domain name setup fee". This takes only 15-30 minutes at most. Therefore, this fee should be negligible, and certainly not more than about $50. There are some absolutely outrageous fees out there -- like $150 or $200. This is nothing but pure greed. If a company has dollar signs in its eyes, it’s probably overcharging for other things as well.

Some companies will waive the fee, and set up the name on their servers for free, but you will always have to pay for the domain name registration. Now that you know the costs associated with domain names, you won’t let yourself be ripped off!

A good many companies also charge a one-time fee for getting your website area set up for you. This is referred to usually as a "website setup fee" or sometimes just a "setup fee". Again, this should be a reasonable amount, such as $50. The process of creating a area on a disk and pointing the web server to it takes just only a few minutes. Therefore, you shouldn’t be paying someone more than it’s worth.

One last thing you might want to check on as far as hidden costs are concerned is what kind of reporting services the company has for telling you how many visits your website is getting each month. This is important information to know. Additionally, the reporting tools should make it easy to see how many requests each page has gotten not including graphics. Graphics are loaded automatically when a user visits a page, and there are usually a number of them on each page. Therefore, counting them into the hit count is cheating. You should be able to find out at a glance how many actual requests the .html page received. This is much more useful information than simply receiving a lump-sum total for your entire site, since it may give you clues as to which parts of your site visitors don’t like or aren’t finding useful.

There are some companies who charge an additional fee for using their web reporting tools, for example $10/month or more. This is a service which should be free when you pay for hosting, since there are many web reporting software packages out there, many of which are either free or very reasonably priced. If you’re paying for this service, you’re definitely getting ripped off.

The Whole Package

We have now covered all of the criteria in what to look for in evaluating a website design firm and a website hosting firm. If your end up selecting the same company to do both, you might see what kind of package deal they offer. Some companies will waive the fee for the first year or first few months of hosting if you meet a certain pricing minimum for website design. However, be very wary of companies that offer free design with your hosting. Generally speaking, you will get what you paid for in terms of the design -- they will throw the project to the first pimply-faced techie in the back room who just came on the job yesterday. When it comes to your company’s reputation, you really can’t afford that, no matter how inexpensive it is.