How To Find A Website Designer For Any Business

Professional web designers possess a deeper knowledge of what improvements can help your site to create a strong first impression and gain better credibility, higher rankings on Google, and, of course, increased revenues. 

However, among thousands of freelancers expertized in web design, choosing the one with proficient skills within the target field is a real challenge. Realizing this issue, Devox Software experts have created a simple guide on how to find a website designer for any company. Use it to find a perfect fit for your business needs regardless of its industry operation, size, and target budget. 

As a part of our discussion, Devox Software will review the best marketplaces for finding a website designer, the essential qualifications you should look for in your potential candidate, and the key stages of hiring a web design expert for your business. 

Let’s dive in!

Who Are Web Designers & What They Do

The first step toward hiring an ideal web design specialist for your business is understanding the job’s basics. First, this can help you to understand what processes this expert is responsible for. Additionally, it enables business owners to understand whether or not it’s the right expert needed for the target objectives and how many experts you need to create a powerful website for your enterprise. 

So, a web designer is a creative specialist responsible for a website’s layout and usability. In other words, they create top-notch user experience and user interface (UX and UI). The latter can make the right first impression about your brand, adds credibility and online performance, engages more potential clients, and drives more conversions. 

Web designers are often confused with web developers, whose responsibility is limited to the technical performance of your website: front-end and back-end development that ensure its robust performance in a long-term perspective.

To hire the right expert for your business, make sure to answer the question, “What do you want to get: the site’s design or its technical performance?” If your answer is “the website design,” – keep on reading to find out how to find a website designer for your project!

Where Can You Find a Website Designer for Your Project

Once you’ve decided you need a website designer, the obvious question you’ll come up with is where to find a website designer. One of the first things immediately coming to mind is to post a call on freelance platforms, which feature thousands of different experts willing to take your project on board at the most reasonable rates. 

On the other hand, you may also want to hire a web design agency. Regardless of higher rates, it is sure to provide decent design solutions that specifically fit your business objectives and needs. Typically, such firms avoid using a one-size-fits-all approach. In turn, it benefits the business competitiveness in the market and, consequently, higher rates. Below we’ve reviewed the most popular options for hiring web design experts, explaining the specifics of each and the advantages they can provide for your business.

Upwork

When asking about the most popular marketplace that can help you address the ‘how to choose a web designer’ challenge, most business owners start their research on Upwork. Without any doubt, this platform enables employers to find the required freelancers within just a few clicks: create the job description, review the applications and hire your best candidate. Also, you can check the catalog of the most reputable experts and active freelancers to find the web design gigs that ideally work for your project.

Some of the best features about Upwork for web design talent research are:

The main challenge of finding a website designer through Upwork is that you need to vet each candidate yourself, which takes lots of time.

Freelancer

If you’d prefer to get an expert for long-term cooperation, a proven way to ensure you’ll choose the right expert is to conduct the contest. Freelance.com is one of the best online marketplaces where experts are selected based on bids or offer submissions. This service is also a great fit for multi-stage projects like a series of websites, so if you’re planning to launch or redesign several platforms at a time – place your job offering immediately.

A few of the nicest features business owners like about this platform are:

• The ability to provide milestone payments, which keeps your funds fully secure and wisely invested
• Excellent project management, which implies hand choosing the most relevant expert to run your web design project, as well as the designers for its successful completion
• The ability to create a web design team to run your project with the advanced Enterprise virtual studio feature (at no fees!)

The main problem with the Freelance.com platform is that there are many inexperienced designers, so you risk wasting your time with a person with little real-world experience.

99designs

Though the service is more popular among industry-specific communities, it’s still a decent marketplace for getting a creative and highly expertise web designer for your business. The service features comparatively high rates but can cover more field-specific needs and requirements instead. For instance, creator vetting, source files, and full copyright ownership.

The most notable advantages for choosing a web designer at 99designs include:

• The ability to conduct large-scale contests and involve top-level designers
• An option to utilize Adobe Stock items for the project
• The ability to leverage Pro features: accessing a dedicated group of designers or getting a remote creative studio

Being a very niche platform, 99designs charges a significant fee for working through the platform which increases the overall design budget.

Design Crowd

Another contest-based marketplace that can greatly contribute to finding the right expert is DesignCrowd. This platform has been widely known in the web design field as an efficient way to reach out to multiple experts at a time, review submissions, and accept the result you like best. Contest pricing is based on the number of submissions you want to choose from. So when paying more, you can expect a broader range of results.

Here’s what businesses like in this service when choosing a web designer:

• The project requirements can be changed during the contest to achieve the desired results
• The service provides a money-back guarantee, which indicates you’ll pay only for the results you like
• Agencies and businesses with large-scale needs can white-label the designs they accept to get better results in less time.

Professionals on Design Crowd usually work on multiple projects simultaneously, thus you won’t have a designer deeply immersed in the specifics of your project.

Web Design Agency

Those who’ve had at least a little experience working with freelancers know that finding a good expert is always a pain. You need to ensure the candidate features the required expertise and skills, is responsible, result-oriented, and open to communication – all these qualities are essential for achieving the desired results. 

Suppose you’re afraid of entrusting your website to amateurs or have already had a bad experience working with freelancers. In that case, hiring a reputable web design company can be the right thing to do. These firms offer excellent outstaffing and outsourcing services in the web design field. They are ready to get your project on board right after consultation and feature a decent pool of tech talents with proven expertise within the target industry.

Some of the best advantages of hiring a professional web design agency like Devox Software:

• It is always in the loop of the latest UX/UI trends across different industries
• It enables to significantly save the project’s delivery time
• It features a larger portfolio and thus, is more likely to provide the specific and more efficient solutions
• It provides high-quality web design experts
• It helps you extend your team with professionals who are deeply engaged in your project
• It allows you to find the first candidates within 3-5 days, and the whole hiring cycle can be reduced to as little as 10-20 days
• You’re guaranteed to get continuous support that is usually overlooked when contracting with freelancers

Working with a web design agency is the best way to receive high-quality services. However, you need to budget accordingly if you choose this approach.

Now that we’ve reviewed the most common solutions on where to find web designers, it’s time to go deeper into what qualifications you should look for in your ideal web designer!

How to Check the Qualification of a Designer?

Once you’ve decided what service to use for searching for the relevant expert in web design, the next question to be answered is how to find out the true expert within this field. Without any doubt, outstaffing firms and freelancers feature promising portfolios, reassuring their clients about the top-notch skills and exclusive expertise in web design of the highest level. 

However, in practice, they may fail to perform the required tasks or submit poorly-made work to be rebuilt with your next contractor. This can result in an increased budget, add-on resources needed, and, which is the most critical – significant time loss. 

To prevent this experience, any hirer needs to conduct a qualification checkup of your expert. This becomes exceptionally important when hiring a website designer, as this person will be responsible for creating the brand identity online, as well as how audiences will accept it.

At Devox Software, we pay particular attention to the following qualities when choosing a web designer for a client’s project:

• Design Principles. Ask your potential web designers to explain the basic design principles they widely implement in projects and which problems they have been typically dealing with (visual design, branding, interaction, or navigation). It would be a plus if the expert could showcase this on the past projects they were engaged in.
• Design Software. Web designers should feature decent expertise in industry-standard tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, CMS systems (WordPress, Shopify, etc.), as well as programs like Sketch, Invision, and FlowMap, which are extremely popular in the target field. If you haven’t heard of the tools your potential candidates use, feel free to ask them to generally introduce those and explain what processes they’re contributing to.
• Tech Languages Expertise. Website designers don’t need to possess deep expertise in programming languages, but they’ll surely need to know the basics of HTML for scripting and CSS for styling. 
• UI Best Practices. The awareness of the latest UI trends and best practices in UI for the web is essential for making your website look appealing. Some popular tools used here include Sketch, Adobe XD, UXPin, Marvel, Figma, InVision Studio, and Zeplin.
• UX Best Practices. Apart from the visual part, designers should also mind the website’s usability and continually look for ways to improve it. Typically, this is performed in the following UX frameworks: FlowMap, Optimal Workshop,Proto.io, and Adobe XD.
• Portfolio Checkup. No matter whether you’re hiring a freelancer or a professional web design agency, it’s essential to review the portfolio of your vendor before signing the contract, as it helps to get a more accurate idea of what they can do and what outcome to expect in the home stretch. Choose the vendor whose portfolio resonates with you the most to ensure they can deliver the maximum value to your business.

Knowing these recommendations, you’ll be guaranteed to find a highly qualified website designer who will surely enhance your enterprise’s performance regardless of its market focus and business operation specifics.

Contact Devox Software If you Need Professional Web Designers

This guide has uncovered the basics of how to hire a website designer, what qualities business owners should look for when choosing their ideal candidate, and what are the best places to start your research. It’s not required for a business owner to possess deep knowledge of web design – understanding the general insights on the responsibilities and processes a website designer handles is pretty enough to choose the right expert for your process. 

When hiring a freelance web designer might be a bit risky, entrusting your website design project to an expert firm, such as Devox Software, ensures you’ll get the best result in nearly 100% of cases. Check our portfolio to see the various projects we worked on and the challenges we tackled. Already have a project for us?

Contact our experts today to get the high-qualified consultation from our best web designers and discover the proven ways to enhance your business online right away!