Many experts will recommend that you look at a company’s portfolio before choosing them to work on your website development project. This is all well and good, but if you do not know anything about website design, how can you tell whether the sites you are looking at are well designed? Here are a few things that you may want to look for in the designs you are viewing.

You can get a feel for the company that owns the site

This can be difficult but it is very important. Remember that your website needs to give your clients an idea of what your company does or offers in a very short time. A good website design will say a lot about the company that owns it. It will feature color schemes and images that relate to the industry or products the company deals with. If you are looking at a collection of very generic websites you may want to think about working with another company that can produce more specific sites for their clients.

The layout is easy to navigate

If you are looking at a quality website, it will be easy for you to tell where you should look for key pieces of information. Links and buttons will be easy to find. They should be large enough to find easily and labeled so that users can tell what they are clicking on. A site that is poorly designed may have buttons that are hard to read or even difficult to find. This is especially important if you are operating a virtual storefront. If your customers cannot find your products they will not buy them.

The site loads quickly

This is something that you cannot tell from a printout. A site needs to load quickly regardless of the speed of a person’s internet connection. If it takes too long for a site to load it will actually cause viewers to go elsewhere. If you want to be able to judge whether a site will upload reasonably quickly you may want to write down some of the addresses and try to bring them up at home or at the office.

There should also be no broken links or images that fail to load. This can be a sign that the coding which built the site has errors or omissions. Again, these are things that can drive potential customers away and cause them to deal with another company that is working in the same niche you are.

The storefront should work well

If a site has a store front, it should be well designed and the product images and descriptions should be easy to view. Any shopping cart functionality should also be easy to use and should be functioning properly. Again, if your store front and shopping cart do not work properly you may find that you are losing out on potential sales.

It can also be a good idea to speak to the clients who had sites built for them. You want to make sure that a company can work well within deadlines and that the Website they built was not overly difficult to use. If you do these things you have the best chance of finding a company that will give you the site you have always wanted.