Toronto Web Design Help
There are easy things in life and hard things in life, and one of the hard ones is finding good Toronto web design. Don’t worry though, I’ve found someone and I think it’s going to be a great little relationship. Here are the top companies I’ve found, ranked.
Dreamzinfo
Crescan
Abacus webservices
There are lots and lots of companies that will make you a website, some good, some awful, so let’s look at why I chose lifeline design for my web design, and learn something about design on the way, shall we?
I always pick customer service as the top thing to consider, because its very important to me. I think that when we consider it, we all really want proper customer service, because it makes us feel like we’re worth it. And lets face it, we are. If we’re paying good money for a website, we should really be getting what we’re paying for, and not all companies are willing to do that for some reason. Finding a company that’s close to you is a good idea, if you have meetings with someone who can easily drive in and meet with you, that’s great. If you have to call someone out west or in the US or overseas, you really aren’t getting the same level of service. You don’t get to look the person in the face and really see what they’re saying and thinking. Body language is huge, and in person meetings are really important. Skype just isn’t the same as having someone in Toronto discussing your web design with you. Not to mention the phone and data cost involved, and the personnel time if something goes wrong.
Which means we’re now discussing price. And isn’t that what really matters? I’m not talking about up front cost though, the ‘bottom line’ to do a website. If you’re looking for the absolute cheapest website that you can come up with, just make a single splash page with your contact information on it and be done with it. Anything more than that and you’re probably going to be doing the exact opposite of what you actually want to do, you’ll be pushing people away from your website. People aren’t very tolerant of slow, hard to use or confusing websites, and they’ll leave quickly to go find your competitors. A bad website not only doesn’t bring in money, it can actually cost you money in lost sales, and that’s just plain bad. So, then what do you do? You find the company that will produce the web design that fits in your budget, as long as that budget is realistic. Two thousand dollars just isn’t at all realistic for a good site and design. Of course you don’t want to be overpaying for things like shopping carts when you don’t need one for your website, that would be silly. You want to find the company that will give you what you want and charge you a fair price for it. Best I’ve found in Toronto is Lifeline Design.
So how do you pick a company that will give you what you need and hopefully love, at the price that is just the right amount for what you want to achieve? The only way I know of, short of hiring a dozen companies and paying ridiculous amounts of money, is to look at portfolios. What kind of companies and designs has this web company done before? Have they done things in my field, worked with companies that are in my line of business? They might have some good tips for me to get a leg up on the competition. Sounds good to me! Also, do I actually like the designs that the company is producing. If they can show me 10 solid designs that work for the companies that use them, that makes a huge difference to the company with a handful of poorly thought out designs that I’m not really impressed with. So make sure you get a really good look at the type of work that the company has done before, and talk to those people.
Customer testimonials are a great thing to use to really test out a company. Do they have them on their website? Are they video or easily faked text testimonials? Can you contact the actual people that made the testimonials and ask them about the company? That’s what you really want, honest feedback from people that have hired them, they know what their support is like, if they’ll meet budgets and deadlines, or if they’ll be all over the place and completely unreliable. It’s a tough thing to determine, but is probably one of the most important elements to being able to pick a good web designer.
These were a few of the reasons that I used to pick Lifeline Design as my Toronto web design company. There are lots more, like a great CMS, backup guarantees and other things of that nature. Be sure to do your homework, and if you follow this quick guide I’m sure you’ll have a great website. Stay tuned for more web design posts!
