Introduction

For a lot of start-up businesses, it can sometimes be a bit of a rush to get the business up-and-running, and this often means that there are so many things to think about and it can be a very hectic time.

For example, you might be meeting with various estate agents, to find a suitable office premises, you might be interviewing staff for many different jobs that your company needs filling, you might be purchasing furniture so that you have everything ready the first day at work.

Now, like most businesses, you might have recognised that you need a brand-new website for your business all set-up and ready to go, yet some business owners, make the mistake of hiring a web designer, just purely on the basis of price alone.

That’s to say, you might be on social media see a business that offers say a fixed-price CMS website offer, and you might be like, wow, that looks like a great price.

However, this article has been written, by our web designers, to highlight why it’s important to pick a professional web designer or agency, not just on price alone, but on the basis that you wish to work with them on a long-term basis.

A lot of businesses think, that they should go for the cheapest quote, however we think it’s much more important to pick web design agency where each offers you an affordable price, but also one that you are happy to work with over the long term basis.

One which your happy to pick up the phone and chat to, one which explains everything to you, one which answers their emails in a timely manner.

As this article will illustrate to you, you don’t just need your marketing company to design the website, and then that’s it, instead often you need the web designers for ongoing services such as website hosting, domain name renewal service, writing blog posts say every week, organic SEO and also sometimes CMS training on how to use the website as well for example.

So for example, getting a website built might just be the start, you may have a really well-designed website, say built in PHP, it’s a WordPress site, your really happy with the work the web developers have done, your over the moon.

But, you might not want to hire say one business to manage the seo, one to manage the businesses social media, such as Facebook, another to write the blog posts, and a separate hosting company, and a separate domain name company, so why not think about hiring Top Space, here in Wales, as we can offer all of these services under one roof.

Professional Website Designer

First things first, we think it’s really important not just to pick any old web design company, but to pick a professional website designer, which designs high-quality websites, which will really take the time to understand your business, and to produce a really good CMS website of your company.

Far too many businesses, offer cheap quotes, and so many companies hire the wrong agency or business, then end up your website this very hard to edit, SEO cannot easily be applied, and it may suffer from a lot of glitches because the CMS might not have updates. For example, the site might be a bespoke site, built by PHP developers, but it might be a poorly designed CMS, it might have a dashboard that’s very hard to use, so even adding something simple, like a 500 word article, that you’ve just been busy writing over a coffee, well, it might be so difficult to add the post, a meta title, meta description and the article, well you give up! And this is what can happen when you hire the wrong web developers, every change you make to the site, no matter how simple it sounds, well becomes difficult.

So, then you might even resort to emailing the web developers for help, which will obviously cost more, so our best advice is hire a respected web designer, or agency, and pick a CMS which best suits your company, for example WordPress might be best suited to what your business needs?

For example, it might be a bespoke website, built in a CMS that is unique to that web design agency, yet what happens if that web designer, or the business was to go bankrupt? Can you receive support for the website?

This is why it’s worth carefully thinking about which company you opt for, to pick a company that offers you really good value.

Hosting and Domain Names

At a minimum, you often have to deal with your website designers on an ongoing basis in order to renew your domain names and hosting, you might do this with a separate company, but a lot of companies often go with the company that either the web designers recommend, or the website hosting and domain name renewal service that they offer. This means, lets say you hire a Cardiff web developer, they build the site, sometimes the domain name, the hosting is included in the price of design sometimes for say a year, yet after a year, often you have to pay each month, or year, yet some web designers, they charge for domain name and hosting right from the start, so this is something worth asking about, as costs do vary depending on which design agency you hire to build your website.

Edits

We would say it is very likely that you are going to need edits in the future for your companies website, this might be something as basic as changing the businesses phone number and the address or it could be something much more complicated, for example, it could be a lot of work, for example that the business is going to change the products or services that it offers, therefore the evergreen content marketing might need to be rewritten completely, which is obviously going to take up a lot of time.

Therefore, whichever company that you do end up hiring here in Cardiff, for example, you may hire a company that is based in the heart of Cardiff Bay near the docks, or perhaps you hire a freelancer which is based in say Llanishen within Cardiff Wales, you should make sure that you have a good working relationship with that person or web design agency, so that you can work with them if edits are needed in the future to your company’s website.

SEO

What a lot of companies quickly recognises is, that they need their business to invest in SEO, therefore rather than hire a separate SEO agency sometimes the web designers will also offer SEO as a service, however as a business here in Cardiff, or whenever your business is based, you should only invest in top quality white hat SEO.

Content Marketing

You may wish to hire a digital marketing agency that’s located here in Cardiff, which also offers content marketing and SEO, this written work often needs to be written on a regular basis, and this can sometimes be very time-consuming, this is why a lot of businesses, ranging from plumbers right through to large law firms, use their marketing agency to write this work for them.

NAP

Your name of your business, it’s address or its phone number (NAP) may need updating, sometimes this means that the web developer will need to rewrite the footer text, the header and also the contact us page, therefore you might need a PHP web developer to do this, in the future.

Plug-in updates

Some CMS, that’s content management systems for those that do not know what this means, will need updating, for example let’s say that you have a rather quality WordPress website built by a website design company, often you will still need the help of your agency, that’s to keep the plugins regularly updated, for example the WordPress plugins will often need updating on a regular basis, you may wish to hire an agency or lets say a local freelancer which can do this for you. Its important to keep your businesses CMS plugins up to date, for example lets say you run a law firm, your based in Wales, you might not employ anyone in the company who updates the website, its therefore important to hire a web developer or agency which makes sure your company website is updated, that the plugins, for example the WordPress plugins, that these are kept updated.

Back-up the website

You might wish to hire a company that not just designs your new website, but will also makes regular back-ups and sends them to you, you should therefore enquire whether your web designers, offer this service to back-up your website up on a regular basis for you, or not?

 

WordPress Training

Your business may require WordPress training, or other CMS training, you should therefore enquire whether your web design company that you hired, in Cardiff, offers the service not?

Affordable amendments to the website

You might get a really cheap quote to design the new website, let’s say to design a WordPress website, but how much does the agency charge per hour, to make web design amendments in the future?

You might find it it’s rather expensive per hour to hire web developers for the web design changes that your company needs, therefore you may have wish to pick another web design business here in Wales, therefore you should ask what the amendment rate is per hour, or the hourly rate for the web designers?

Update the CMS

You should enquire who will update the CMS? For example if you have a WordPress CMS, you will often require regular updates, and you should enquire whether the web design business offers this service?

 

CMS training

Glitches

If a glitch occurs, you should enquire how much it will cost to fix the problem?

 

Good business relationship

Therefore the basis of this whole article is all about whether you think you can have a good working relationship with the web designers, therefore it’s not just about getting a website designed, it’s about finding a company that your business wants to work with on a long-term basis.

Affordable fees

You should find web designers which offer affordable fees.

How our business can help

Whether you run a car dealership, you are a plumber, you run a law firm here in the city of Cardiff, we have web developers and web designers which can build brilliant website for your business.