What to expect and Not to Expect from your web designer

Aug 9, 2017

When you signed a web designer up to create your website, we normally draw up a contract so you know what exactly what you can expect your web designer to do and what not in their scopes. It is a good thing to have a chat with your designer if you are not clear about the inclusions so you don’t feel like you get trapped in the middle of the process.

What can you expect

You can expect that we design to follow your requirement & brief

By taking your time in answering your design brief, you help your designer to understand your business and your needs and tailor the website to your requirement. It also means though, that we designers would normally charge extra if you require extra features that are not in the initial scope. This is because it requires more research and more time to implement it – sometimes it even means the change of the direction of the website!

A good designer will design your site with good SEO & marketing practice in mind

We are here to help you make the most of your website. If you sell things online, we will design the website to help you sell more. If you sell courses, we will find the best way to make a better experience for your students.

A good website is not just a pretty face but in order to make it work, it needs to follow certain principals and rules. Your web designer will have a reason as to why she puts your phone number on the top of the website header, and why she keeps the images as lower quality images. amongst other strategies for higher conversion rates that she might apply to your website.

Some other ideas that she might suggest:

More structured website to simplify the user experience
Suggesting to have your Click to Action more prominent (this sometimes means we need to work on the objective of your site first. Is it to get more sign up to your freebie, is it sales, is it to get people to book an appointment?)
Colour psychology

We normally do the following to also help your ranking with Google:

We will submit your website and sitemap to Google to help Google index your site faster.
Your website will normally be equipped for the SEO optimisation in the back end that will allow you to work on the SEO better and will be submitted.

You should have a full admin right to your site

This means you should be able to add, delete, edit more contents, including images, pages, details and not depending on your website designer to make any changes. Once you paid off the invoice, you should have all the rights as you own the website. You will be able to access your source files, access your hosting and all things associated with your website.

What are normally not included

Website Maintenance

Due to the nature of open source platforms such as Wordpress, we recommend you to keep up to date with the updates and upgrades. It is a bit like having a car, just because you buy a brand new car, it doesn’t mean you need any maintenance and it doesn’t mean it won’t ever break down. The more you spend with the maintenance, the more long lasting your site will be. Keeping your website updated will also minimise your risks at being hacked. Web designer normally charges monthly packages or maintenance fee to help you do this.

In our case, we offer our maintenance package which includes backing up, updating plugins and WordPress core and plugins and minor content updates.

If your shop is using Shopify or BigCommerce, you are in luck as your subscription includes the backing up and updates.

Additional Changes/Revisions

Web designers normally provide a set of allowance for changes, to help minimise the cost. Once you sign off design and the designer started development, we normally charge extra if you change your mind. Why? Because sometimes what looks like an easy changes to a client’s eye might take hours to change at the back end.

SEO

SEO is normally an on-going job, and unless it is described in the scope of your contract, we normally do not include the work itself (ie. keyword research, content optimisation, and the application to the website) as this is normally a big scope of work that needs to be undertaken – your SEO expert will need to spend a great chunk of time to research the keywords and then apply them to the website as well as other strategies that might help your site to reach better ranking.