If you, or your company has been in the market for a new company website, there are a few red flags you should immediately be looking for when choosing your next website design firm.
An Appeal to Trendiness
Marketers understand that the vast majority of products they will be tasked with selling are mundane, and utilitarian, which makes them a hard sell.
So, what marketers do is look for ways to associate their products with popular and trendy things in the culture in an effort to make their products look exciting, youthful and cutting edge. This is marketing 101.
Web firms knowing this, also wrap themselves in the veneer of trendiness in an effort to seem cool to perspective clients. The thinking is, if they seem hip and cutting edge, then other companies will want to associate their products and services with them in an effort to be equally as cool.
So, design firms knowing this will dress their websites up in a variety of ways to project a hipster image. Grungy, and edgy graphics, pictures of them playing ping-pong, beer kegs in the break room, placing their dogs on the company about us page as “Office Manager”, etc. Anything that cultivates that desired hipster image. The problem is, none of these things will tell a perspective client anything of substance.
What customers need to know is what kind of technologies they are deploying the website on, how quick is their customer support turn-around, can they justify their billing structure, what kind of custom development can they do on their platforms, what kind of infrastructure is in place to accommodate growth, etc. These are far more important questions to be asking a perspective web firm.
If you are leaving a website and all you know is they have some basic services, like to hike, and have a dog for an office manager then chances are good, they are more form than substance.
Published on 2/2/2019 (5 years 81 days ago)