I recently accepted a design job for a friend. The designer she had hired pre­vi­ously not only decided he didn’t want to do the work any more, he also didn’t have a clue what he was doing. This put her (and me) in an awk­ward posi­tion to say the least. She didn’t own her domain, she didn’t have any actual con­tact with the designer (e-mail only, and only when he wanted to answer), and worst of all, she didn’t have a con­tract. She had got­ten it in her mind to have a web­site built, and charged in with­out a care. Her “designer” charged her a fairly low price, but gave her exactly what she paid for.

Don’t be this guy

Unfor­tu­nately, there is no gov­ern­ing body for licens­ing or cer­ti­fy­ing design­ers. There is no spe­cific set of courses one must com­plete or set of books one must read to make a busi­ness out of design. As a result, the first time some­one fig­ures out how easy it is to make a site with a WYSIWYG edi­tor (like Front­page or some other equally evil mon­stros­ity), they hang out the shin­gle as a “designer” and wait for the busi­ness to pour in. The prob­lem with this approach is that most of those who go this route don’t know the dif­fer­ence between a designer and a devel­oper (yes, there is a difference).

You get the high school kids (or worse yet, mid­dle school) who’s par­ents or grand­par­ents think they’re just a “com­puter genius” and can “even make web­sites.” You get the folks that have fig­ured out how to use “tem­plates” but know absolutely noth­ing about design (like our hero from a cou­ple para­graphs up). Actual design­ers are usu­ally the last peo­ple con­tacted for web design ser­vices because there are so many of the above.

So, how can you tell what you’re getting?

Well, did you sign any­thing before the work started? If not, you are work­ing with an ama­teur (or a fam­ily mem­ber who’s a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment). A con­tract is extremely impor­tant, not only for the designer, but the client as well. In the case cited above, there was no con­tract. The hack in ques­tion held my client’s domain for ran­som (and some of those nego­ti­at­ing calls were quite fun). He refused to relin­quish con­trol of cer­tain aspects of the site and addi­tion­ally refused to accept the pay­ment he demanded. All told, it took three months to finally be rid of him.

The con­tract gives both par­ties a clear idea of what work is to be done, on what sched­ule, at what cost, as well as who owns the fin­ished prod­uct. With­out those kinds of pro­tec­tion my client was rel­e­gated to play­ing games with a manip­u­la­tive con­trol freak. He could bill her what­ever fee he wished, and if she refused to pay it he’d sim­ply shut her site down.

I could beat this horse more if you wish, but it’s dead. Get a contract…

Where’s the port­fo­lio? Have you seen exam­ples of this designer’s work? What design­ers do is all about aes­thet­ics, appeal and usabil­ity. If there are no exam­ples thereof, how can you be sure they even know how to pro­nounce aes­thet­ics? In the case of my client from above, her designer had no web­site. There was no men­tion of him any­where on the Inter­net (except for one real-estate web­site, but that was as a realtor).

The idea here is sim­ple. If you were to com­mis­sion a paint­ing of your grand­mother, would you pick some ran­dom per­son on the basis of a rec­om­men­da­tion from some­one who was in grade school art with him? I didn’t think so.

How respon­sive is your designer? Seri­ous design­ers will return phone calls and e-mails within 24 hours. There will always be peri­ods of incom­mu­ni­cado, be it fam­ily mat­ters or vaca­tions. The fact remains, no com­mu­ni­ca­tion is bad (on both fronts). As a designer, I’ve had clients who pay to have work done then drop out of the process. It’s frus­trat­ing to me, so I can imag­ine what clients must feel when they pay a designer up-front money only to have the designer dis­ap­pear for a few weeks.

How much is he charg­ing? As a designer, one of the most frus­trat­ing notions clients have is the one that goes like this. A prospec­tive client calls and asks how much a web­site design costs. When I ask what they want, the only answer they have is “a web­site.” As a client, you must under­stand that this is exactly the same as call­ing a car deal­er­ship and ask­ing for a car, and ask­ing how much. The dealer will ask what kind of car, with what kind of fea­tures and in what color. If you don’t have any answers for him, he won’t have any for you.

If you ask “how much” and your designer has an answer, you should look else­where. Firstly, you’re going to get cookie cut­ter crap, and sec­ondly you are going to be gouged later for “updates.”

I hope this helps you, the prospec­tive client, under­stand what can go wrong with web design. If you chose to hire me, won­der­ful. If not, I can rec­om­mend some great com­pa­nies and design­ers. Just don’t hire the ones men­tioned above.

–theAkka­dian