The outsourcing genie today may have spawned its web over four continents, but when it comes to the local spices and flavor, you still need a developer at home. A web design company that is able to understand the nature of your business and your customers is immensely more useful than a bunch of developers in a smoke reeking room in India or Philippines. In turn, while your cost may rise while opting for a web design company at your hometown, it pays off to have a homely feel to it.
Web designer is an easy species to find -over Internet and offline. Each city hosts its own large mushrooming industry related to web and graphics. Score of well established and professional companies will give you plenty of options in terms of taste and feeling. While building a website may be a science in itself, the design aspect is very much an art, with due emphasis on user interaction, layout and colors. Not to be ignored are the peculiarities of each different kind of target audience. While company X might be more suited to give a professional and excellent look, you might have to turn to company Y for a hippie look if you are targeting college goers.
Start off with finding specific details about as many companies that meet your requirement as possible. Places where you can get hold of neat information are niche web directories, local listings and yellow pages. And if you are not sure about the streets, Google Maps can dot it for you with the company names on the city map. Yellow pages are available both online and in print, and can also add up to your total information. Remember, your decision needs to be based on factors like your target audience, specialty of each company and their portfolio. Costs spend here can add up illegally to your business in the longer run.
Friends in the field and peer advice about different web designing companies are also very helpful means. In fact, word of mouth reviewing has been found to be the most sincere and effective form of marketing. Experience of a like-minded pal who recently recalled a designer can let you gauge their working ethics, environment and degree of professionalism.
If you have been particularly impressed by a website, say of a local Chinese café, you might want to contact the developer straight away. In that case you will have to locate the 'developer' link on the website, usually a small one in the footer of the homepage. Or else, you can compliment them for a brilliant website and ask them about their designing company who developed it. If your web designer is in sync with your audience's intuition, you can go a long way in creating a site that works as they want it to, and a local designer can do it a lot better than someone unplugged from life here.
