What should I look for when hiring a professional designer?

Question: What should I look for when hiring a professional designer?

Answer: Good professional designers are hard to find. It’s not that there aren’t pleny of good designers out there to choose from, it’s just that sometimes it can be challenging to sort through all the companies and freelancers out there to find the best ones to suit your specific eCommerce needs. The fist thing you should look for when hiring a professional is examples of their work. Ask if you can see an online portfolio or some live examples of completed projects they have done for others. Depending on the size of the portfolio, you may even find examples similar to the ideas you have or the layouts you like. Some designers discourage contact with their previous clients, but depending on their policy you may wish to contact the site owners to guage their interaction and experience with the designer you are considering.

Take time to research the professional designer or company to find out how long they have been in business, how many satisfied clients they have and if they had any disatisfied clients (chances are they do, but you can at least see for yourself what the main complaints were about). You may also wish to price compare, shop around or barter price, but you should expect to get what you pay for (meaning don’t expect a $10,000.00 store design for pennies).

Another imortant aspect of hiring a professional design team is to research how marketable their storefronts are within search engines and other avenues of eCommerce marketing. Quite simply, you want a store that is considered ’search engine friendly’ as opposed to a store that may not perform as well in search engines. Designers who build search engine friendly stores will take the time in the beginning to set it up right for search engine marketing which will save you time and money down the road. If the designer you are considering does not build search engine friendly stores you may wish to re-think hiring them for the project (ie. if they build strictly flash sites you would not want to hire them).