Web Design Buyer's Guide
Questions you should ask a web design company:
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Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) included in the price?
Many companies will develop a website for you and then a few months later you will ask, "Why is my website not appearing very high on Google". Their answer will be "for £xxx we can now optimise your website for search engines". GloverSure do not do that. We optimise the website as we develop it, as it only takes us a few hours longer but it makes much more sense to do it from the beginning. It's like building a house and then deciding we would like extra windows in it; it's going to be more expensive! We include Search Engine Optimisation of content and code in our prices and also then give you advice on further work you can do yourselves including link building.
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Do you code websites by hand?
Many web design companies will try and speed up the process of web design using tools such Dreamweaver to code up a website. This allows them to offer websites for cheaper as it takes less time to develop, but the website will not be as Search Engine Optimised and is unlikely to be standards compliant; hence your website will be a lot lower on Google.
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Do you design websites to meet accessibility standards?
This is very important; you can be breaking the law if your website does not meet these standards. All our websites meet accessibility standards.
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Will you purchase a template to use for the design of my website?
Some web designers purchase a template to; once again, speed up the web design process. The problem with this is that many other companies will have a very similar website to yours. At GloverSure each website has a unique design. Just have a look at our portfolio page to see the distinctive designs we have created for each customer.
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Do you do all your work in house or sub contract?
All our work is done in house and we do not sub contract any work. In fact, GloverSure does a lot of sub contract work for other companies. If a company sub contracts their work then you are likely to be paying more than you otherwise would for your website.
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How long have you been in the web design businesses?
GloverSure have been developing websites since July 2004 and we are going to be about for many years to come. We have a very successful business module that allows us to compete in the very competitive web design industry and offer a very high level of service. Over the last few years we have seen many web design companies come and go and leave behind many unsatisfied customers who are left with no one who can support their website.
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Do you own the server that you will be hosting my website on?
The majority of web design companies do not own their own server; they use cheap shared hosting, where there are many thousands of websites on the same server from many different web design companies. This is likely to cause problems for your website because if any of the websites on this server have a large amount of visitors, your website will end up being very slow and your emails will take longer to come through to you; and if your website takes too long to load then a potential customer will give up and look elsewhere. At GloverSure we own our very own server and only our customers' websites are on it. We will never allow any more than a couple of hundred websites on each server and if any customer starts having a lot of traffic then we will move them onto a dedicated server so it does not affect the rest of our clients.
