If you are a company in the UK's second city and are contemplating employing a Birmingham website design company to design, develop and build your corporate website, take a little time to ensure that you have the correct company to meet your business's specific requirements. A well designed and maintained website can be very beneficial to your business, so you will need to make sure that the Birmingham website design company you choose has the skills and technical knowhow to make your corporate world wide web presence worth the time and investment you and your company spend on it.

Do your homework on the Birmingham website design company you are asking to tender for your business, spend time online or otherwise to check over testimonials and portfolio's to ascertain whether they have the same concepts and visions that reflect your corporate image. Do not forget that your website will probably be the first point of contact that a potential client makes with you, and first impressions last. The Birmingham website design company you choose should be up to speed with all the latest online technologies and trends. Their portfolio should be large and varied, do they have any blue chip companies on their books? Ask about for referrals, do you know anyone who has used them before?

Will the website be hosted on the Birmingham website design company's own servers or remotely by another firm? This could cause problems as server down time could be longer or coding errors not rectified as. Does the company have a good record for customer service? Do they have a reputation for unstable servers? If a potential client visits your website and is met with an error page they are more than likely to move on to a competitor's website and give them their business. This of course will not be your fault, but you are unlikely to be compensated for a missed opportunity. Ensure the Birmingham website design company you choose has a good reputation on the server side of the business.

Make sure you get assurances that the Birmingham website design company's developers can design, implement and maintain any bespoke solution that your business requires no matter how complex. You may require an online shopping area on your website or a complex financial calculator that will need to number crunch an array of statistics and deliver the answers in a short amount of time. Do they have any examples of this type of work that they have previously carried out? If the system crashes while your site is making a financial transaction, the repercussions could be very costly.

Will the Birmingham website design company you choose carry out any other online services? Ask if they run pay per click campaigns, this could help drive the required traffic to your site. Do they specialise in search engine optimisation? There is absolutely no point in employing a Birmingham website design company to design, build, develop and host your corporate website if no one has any idea you are there. They may be able to supply quality written content that will also generate a good search engine presence and extra visits from potential customers. Again, ask for examples of quality driven traffic visiting their clients websites. They should be able to produce in depth analysis from websites they host on their servers.