Not all web developers are created equal. With that in mind, your business web site is often the first contact between your company and consumers still shopping around for goods and services. These pre-sale consumers will be visiting your company and your competitors online before actually contacting you in person for the resulting sale. Having an attractive, easy to maneuver business website is going to insure they call you and not your competitor.
Shopping for a web developer can be difficult. Many professional web developers are priced well out of range for small businesses with a limited marketing budget. Other so-called bargain priced web designers are hobbyists. Their experience consists of a few vanity sites for friends and family, they know very little actual code and create sites that aren’t necessarily standards compliant. These bargain designers often use wizards and other “canned” website builder kits that are designed for someone with little or no experience in mind. This will result in your site looking amateurish and like half a million other stops on the internet. These designers are not only code illiterate, often creating hard to manage sites with aesthetic problems, difficult navigation, or worse, but they may not have tested your site in multiple browsers. A professional web developer will make sure the same site that looks slick and professional in Internet Explorer, looks just as good in Firefox or Safari. A professional web developer is also going to test your new website in multiple screen resolutions to ensure what looks good on your screen looks good on everyone else’s screen. If a site state what browser and resolution the site looks best at, the designer didn’t take the time or have the expertise to make the site usable to a wider range of potential customers.
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