Website Designers in Trinidad, How to Engage the Right Partner
By Earl Rennie, Director of Digital Strategy
6 min readFirst published . Refreshed .
Website designers with the right mix of skills, experience and service acumen will make the difference between having a dormant website and one that converts traffic into customers. Six factors separate the real partners from the rest. UX training, clearly defined deliverables, security practice, a portfolio that holds up, proper CMS instruction and customer service that outlasts the launch.
Clearly, the days of thinking about websites as optional are gone. Today, a well-designed web presence is critical to your corporate marketing plan. However, not all web designers are created equal.
The wrong choice leaves you with a site nobody maintains and nobody finds. Here is how to tell the difference before you sign. Below you will find six distinguishing factors that can help you find the right team or website designer for your brand and your goals.
User Experience Design Training.
Web designers all focus on aesthetics, as they should. However, having a skilled eye for design is no longer adequate. Websites are not static pages of information anymore. They take visitors on a journey, and your website designers need to keep the quality of this user experience in mind and in tandem with their visuals.
As a result, you want to look for website designers in Trinidad that have adequate formal training in the UX (user experience) side of UI/UX design. This involves developing a sensitivity to website usability, recognizing that if a site is hard to navigate it does not matter how good it looks.
Web designers with a background in user experience will understand how to use customer personas to drive design choices, how to conduct proper user research, and will naturally be empathetic to a user's journey. This extra training can mean the difference between a site that retains traffic, and one that deflects it.
Clearly Defined Deliverables.
A design firm that presents clearly defined deliverables in their conversations and in their estimates is a digital agency that favours trust and transparency over upsells and hidden costs.
Too often digital agencies will leave you longing for more details on the deliverables. When this is unintentional it points to a lack of experience and an inability to provide critical specificity. But intentional omissions are far worse, since these indicate a desire to take advantage of your ignorance of the web design process, upselling functionality that should be included by default.
To be certain you are working with a website designer that values you as a long term client, be sure to discuss deliverables with them and select the firm that is most open and honest about what is, and what is not, included in their price. Our guide to what a website costs in Trinidad shows you what those line items should look like.
A Focus on Website Security.
Cybercrime is on the rise. More than ever before, websites that do not have proper security protocols in place are putting their data and their customers' sensitive information at risk. Holistic security experience is a critical skill set for any web designer tasked with building a public-facing website.
Not only will deficient security open your website to attack, but it can also affect your search rankings with Google and other search engines. Google favours websites that provide adequate visitor protection and will reward them with higher rankings. Choosing inexperienced website designers in Trinidad may result in painful search penalties that work against your marketing efforts.
Ask prospective digital agencies to describe their security practices. Have them drill down into the specifics. Even if you do not understand everything they say, it should become clear which designers have the proper training and experience.
A Polished & Professional Web Design Portfolio.
A digital agency's portfolio represents the finest, most relevant work it has done for its clients. It is a curated selection of the websites they feel best demonstrate the value they bring to the marketplace. If the chosen samples are polished, original, and effective, that means the agency understands what is important to you as a client and shows they care enough to represent themselves as solidly as possible.
On the other side, if a large portion of the included website designs feel dated or templated, if the navigation feels clunky, or if the user experience is disjointed and confusing, the agency is likely worth avoiding. Either these poor examples represent the best of their work, or the agency is unclear on what makes a strong website and they are choosing bad examples to represent themselves. In either case, the firm suffers from potentially irreparable issues.
Proper CMS Instruction.
A CMS, or content management system, is a website backend that makes it easier for non-designers, like you, to keep a website updated. It allows you to easily add content and modify elements on your own, without having to go back to your website designer for help.
Quality web designers in Trinidad and around the world understand how important it is for customers to understand the workings of their website's CMS, and they will make proper training a priority.
Choose a digital agency that either selects a quality pre-built CMS to work from or that designs its own full-featured system, and then promises ample training and extended support once the website goes live.
A website is only as good as its most recent content, so make certain your website designer makes it easy for you to make needed additions.
Great Customer Service.
Do not settle for a digital agency that assumes their relationship with you is finished the day your website goes live. Websites are fluid creations that require ongoing care, updates, and occasional maintenance.
Web designers that are worth their fees will understand this and will offer you continuing support after launch to make sure your site performs well in search rankings and is not saddled with bugs or slow performance.
Good customer service in many ways captures everything else on this list. A web design agency that focuses on excellent customer service will strive to keep its designs exciting and original, will focus on the user's experience, will abide by industry security best practices, and will work diligently to make sure their clients know how to keep their websites updated and fresh.
Good customer service should be evident the very first time you speak with the digital agency and should carry through the entire design process, through launch, and beyond. When considering web designers in Trinidad, these six qualities will go a long way toward establishing a healthy design partnership.
Ready to Hire a Web Developer in Trinidad?.
Whether you call them a designer, a developer or an agency, the test is the same. Ask about UX training, deliverables, security, the portfolio, CMS training and what happens after launch. If you want to hire a web developer in Trinidad who answers all six without flinching, start a conversation with us and judge for yourself.
