Hiring a web designer for a WordPress website or another type of website just got easier. Web designing is not an easy job for the average person, but there are professionals who have designed websites for years. There are certain set skills that one should know before one can design websites. However, if you are not quite familiar with the intricacies of web design, you should look for the following qualifications in a prospective web designer.
Hiring a web designer is largely based on the type of website you have or want. Based upon what type of features you want in your website, you can discount some of the skills of the prospect that will not be required for your website. For instance, if your website is on the server-side you can overlook the candidate’s lack of experience with JavaScript.
If you want the web designer to take care of the development and presentation of client-side, you naturally want him to have a good mastery on the basics. He should have experience in HTML 4.0, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the document object model (DOM). The web designer should know how to make your web browser pages appear consistent and load them faster.
To determine such skill sets, you should request work samples from the candidate. You should ensure that the candidate is familiar with CSS2 and uses it to place elements in the page without using GIFs. If you find the candidate using marquee tags heavily, you should look for some other suitable candidate.
Although you might not use many graphics on your website, still make sure the website designer has experience with Fireworks and Photoshop. A website designer should have the skill to produce graphics or modify already-existing ones.
When hiring a web designer, make certain that he or she knows how and when to add multimedia elements on your website. An increasing number of websites use animation to make their site more visually appealing, but such animation is usually irrelevant, wastes visitors’ time, and slows down loading times. Animation does have its place but should not be added unnecessarily. Video content and Flash take time to load, and busy surfers do not have time to wait for your site to load. This will cause you to lose traffic to your site.
Your candidate might show you some stimulation of some samples sites for your benefit.
Accessibility has become a major concern and your web designer should be able to address this issue. He should be familiar with CSS2 which takes care of the accessibility issues and know how to use tags to lay out a web page. Your designer should comprehend the relation between each element in your site.
There are other considerations for hiring a web designer that depend on your website needs. You can make sure whether the candidate knows the following:
What are the web-authoring tools he uses
Whether he can develop secure e-commerce environment
Is he capable of work out back-end functions
The development languages he knows
Whether or not he can build tools that will update content easily; to what standard he can validate your code?
What software he uses for animation on website
What will be the time your site will take to load and in which browsers?
Finally, before hiring a web designer, ask him to walk you through one of his design programs. Although you may not understand what he is talking about, you will be able to gauge his or her understanding of the subject by their explanation. If you find the candidate faltering or unable to do so, you can very well look at the next candidate. Hiring a web designer who cannot walk you through his own program is not worth the trouble.
