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The criteria for selecting a Web design firm varies a lot depending on the customer needs and the segment of the market you are targeting.

Everybody have different needs for which you should try to adapt your business to them to some scale. It is very important that you try to differentiate your business from other Web design firms as well.

If your business tends to produce great looking Web sites then the customer that has a very low budget and does not need a great looking Web site should not be your target. Probably, you can lower the price for your customer and produce a cheaper and not so good looking Web site that will take you less time to develop, but it may hurt the image of your company and it may not be what you are look for.

I would quickly break down the criteria as follows (the importance of each criteria will depend on the needs of each customer)

1. Quality/Portfolio
2. Price
3. Customer Service/ Availability by phone/ Response Time
4. If it's a local company or an offshore company
5. Communication Skills
6. Timeframe to complete the Web site
7. Method of payment
8. Down payment requested
9. Professionalism
10. Your ideas/Enthusiasm (the ideas you give the client to develop the Web site)

I would say this would be the main things people analyze when choosing a Web design firm... I also operate a Web design company and that's what I could quickly come up with because of my own experiences.

Whaow !

the url is instancewebgroup.com

the web site is kind of old but it will be re designed next year... we are about to complete our second site (to target a different segment, it will go in a different domain name) I can share it with you when its online!

I hope it helps! take care

That's a tough question to answer. It's difficult because the criteria isn't something that can be explained or written down on a piece of paper. A website, in my opinion, should be the place where a customer sees and feels a mirror image of the physical location. In other words, the virtual resembles the actual. I suppose a criteria would have to be a web designer who conjures up the same feeling (of passion) that the owner has portrayed in her place of business and can re-create them on a website.

Have you ever gone to a place that took your breath away and gone on their website and the same feelings came back to you? If the physical location is that amazing an experience, you want to exude the same. Isn't that what keeps them coming back?

Hmmm. I actually like these outsource firms, as I must get about 1/3 of my projects from clients who have been burnt by overseas outsourcing. I wish there was a way to help save folks earlier, but sooner or later they realize the so-called cost savings are illusionary, and the support is non-existant.

The cheap comes out expensive. (I wish I knew the exact words in Spanish for this phrase).

Bad design costs you far more than good design, and a great website design is a Mike Truese Creation!

www.miketruesecreations.com

In doing this sort of thing since the Internet was new (and even before that), there are certain criteria a Web design/development firm should embrace. Unfortunately, as has been previously stated, umpteen billion of them don't.

First and foremost, as was so rightly pointed out, it's about their business. Not how well you can design or code. First, understand why they do business. Understanding why drives the how. How do they perceive themselves and their business, as well as how do their clients perceive how they do business?

That's when your light should come on and you can start the nuts and bolts process of modeling that how.

Next thing is: what do they know and how do they know it? Any company's biggest asset is knowledge. Whether it's widget production or rocket science. How much of that institutional knowledge is captured? How is captured? Are they leveraging it?

That brings us to content. Content is king. Presentation is the glamour queen. A pretty Web site that says absolutely nothing is just that, a pretty Web site. It won't keep their customers coming back.

Now you have the pieces to go forward. As was also mentioned, gathering those pieces means that you ask lots of questions. Not only does it help you, but it also helps them ... too often companies proceed onward, their original vision clouded by day to day necessities of running a business.

Now the developer hat comes on. By this time, I've generally gotten a good idea of what technology pieces will work for this particular business. Because in my two decades of doing this, one thing has been driven home time and again: there is no one-size-fits-all solution. So you put serious effort into system analysis and design: what works to your convenience might not work to theirs. Sometimes out of the box solutions work just fine, sometimes not and you write it from scratch. Personally, I've always been highly amused with the Programmer Wars ... Java vs. the Evil Empire, vs. PHP vs. any number of solutions that died along the way. You should find what works for your client, you owe them that much.

In this phase, you answer questions about extensibility, data repurposing and ease of maintenance. And you aren't working in a vacuum, at every step the client's input is a critical component. Which brings me to an important point ... probably of such importance that it should have been mentioned sooner: Communication is the key. If your client is doing fruit, but you're thinking apples and he's thinking oranges, you've clearly not communicated.

Now that the nuts and bolts of modeling how they do business are gelling comes the time to dust off the glamour queen and start primping her for the big show. But even here, it's about standards. In business terms, there is a cost benefit for complying with W3C standards: compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict, compliant CSS; and in the XML realm, an wide array of other standards. Here too is where you weigh other standards - compliance with ADA and WAI and how it will fit into the overall design.

Lastly comes the part we all dread: browser compatibility. Adherence to standards actually makes this simpler, though no less onerous. A few ungainly (but unfortunately necessary hacks usually resolves this).

The design aspect is the tricky part. It's an "eye of the beholder" thing. What is snappy, cool and loaded with wow for one company just won't work for another. The design has to fit their image. Branding is very important, and it is easy to let your vision of what they should be outweigh their vision of what they are.

SEO, SEO, SEO. Besides XML, probably the biggest three letters you need to concern yourself with insofar as importance and relevance (no pun intended). Good SEO takes work. Not necessarily back breaking work, but work nonetheless. It is something all too often glossed over by all too many "Web design" companies. Unlike Field of Dreams, if you build it, they won't necessarily come.

The rest is mundane site setting up and maintenance. But that is importance too. Hence the system analysis regarding extensibility. The goal in all this is simple business: your solution and approach should provide the best ROI (Return on Investment) and provide the lowest TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) ... forget the high-tech geek speak ... this is what matters most to business managers who hire consultants to do their company's business.

Brian Milbank
Chief Information Technology Officer
XTechnology Associates, Inc.
http://www.xtechassoc.net