Everyone who takes an online project looks, sooner or later, in this position. One good day the bulb lights up and you are in front of your computer screen saying “I need a redesign now”. You see your website, or your blog, and you notice that there is something that is being left behind. That has lost glamor, freshness. That, with the use and the filling of content, now you think that you need a reorganization in your main menu and that you would not be bad to have a secondary one; or that you see the sidebar a little weird, or that …
In short: you have to take the step of searching and hiring a web designer.
- Talk to professional bloggersTalk to those who are on the Web and who move by blogs and forums for a long time. Yes, it could be worth to you if your friend has been a follower of several kitchen bloggers for years, because he may have seen some mention of someone in his blog. The issue is to get references from designers who have worked with people you know and thus be able to know firsthand information that goes beyond web design: what did you think of working with him / her? It was easy? Did you deliver on time? Did you like the design?
- GooglingSearch the Internet for more references. The more detailed your search, the better. Let’s say, for example, you want a web designer for your cooking blog. Can you imagine that there is just a designer specialized in making kitchen blogs? Would you like to finger … or not. In the results that appear, visit the websites of these designers and assess whether you like what you are seeing or not. Look at how they are described and, above all, in their previous work. Go pointing those you like most.
3. Track opinions in blogs, forums and social networks
Do not look only for the webs of the designers themselves, because what you are interested in is finding the opinion of those who have already been clients. If you are a regular reader of a blogger it is very likely that you have a post about your new redesign and how well the designer did it: here you have a reference. In forums you can also find positive and negative experiences from which to draw conclusions, and finally social networks.
- Experience in similar projectsYou can decide which of these points of the second phase will weigh more on your decision. For example, if you want to redesign an online store, the logical thing is to look for a specialized web designer or who has already done online stores.
- Online presenceThe image and presence on the Internet is (for me) more important than experience. With them I take off at a stroke all the designers that have a web with a portfolio but do not have a blog, do not participate in forums, do not help in social networking communities and so on.