Provide quality Web Design as a business

Web Design is a highly required service lately, as more people and companies got the taste of web advertising and traffic. But along with that, a strong competition has grown among the web design service providers, to make a difference, you need to leave a quality trace all around your work.

Get your contract right

Personally, I do not even want to imagine commercial web projects being done without a contract between both parties. There are quite some nice contract samples out on the web which you can either inspire from or fully use, but along the way, I can tell you a few things a contract needs, so I’d suggest it specifies a few, if not all of the followings:

after a chosen solution, the client has to offer all the data the web pages have to contain and should do so within a limited period of time, to have the project built faster and strategically

client’s agreement on being responsible for all the given data

possibility to pay in more rates

page validation on HTML and CSS

pages will be SEO ready

periodic visual display of the project as it’s being worked

guarantee fully working links

guarantee bug and update fixes in a limited period of time

copyright goes to client, but allow the client to agree whether you are allowed to post the website designer (i.e. you) and have the website presented on your gallery or any other presentational promos for your company, out of appreciation, they should accept

get an advance!

It’s hard to get a good contract right from the start, you’ll find yourself modifying it along the way.

Design impact

Some people prefer to reuse available templates on the web for their clients, to either ease their work or have the client pay less, when instead they should encourage all clients to require and accept a unique design, motivating them with the benefits. I wouldn’t be surprised if some would choose not to require services from a company which has a copied design, it’s not all about the image, but it does show lack of interest.

Solutions to start with

A client should always have the pleasure to choose from more solutions. The solutions should not necessarily be entirely different, but probably 3 solutions from the same design, having different color schemes applied, that makes it easier for you to accomplish and satisfies your client.

Good code

Often, people, clients or other web developers check the code of your work. Having a bad written code may just influence your image negatively. Usually that happens when you use a software which fully or partially handles your code with prefabricated scripts and accessories. I do not recommend any of those in any way, since you would no longer have full control over your project. The code is most likely non-semantic and badly positioned.

If there would be a code editor I’d recommend, it would be NotePad++ and you can find it here: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

As sign of appreciation for the software, I’ll explain a few features:

it colorizes your code by code declarations, making it easy to go through the code

it automatically detects the code language you are using, thus, giving you more precise functionality over it

ability to minimize and maximize block of codes

use of tabs, with ‘remember tabs’ feature

it supports many languages

it’s free!

For some who feel the need for auto-completion editors, I’m sorry but this one does not offer. I personally never liked auto-completion, I enjoy typing all commands and declarations myself, with auto-completion I either end up lazy or forgetting many syntaxes.

I find pure written code from scratch the best professional approach and it gives you much more control over it, especially when you end up doing modifications to it

Always be a solution

If you do not offer further web services, such as hosting, administration, SEO, optimization, marketing, then make sure your client is aware of them and instruct them on how to approach them and throw in some recommendations as well.

From time to time, get in touch with your old clients, find out whether they are still satisfied with your work, if they would like to acquire any further services, suggest new features or perhaps a redesign.

Get a testimonial from all of your clients.

News and Updates

Add your clients to a mailing list and keep them up-to-date on everything that may be of interest, most should be web-related.

Best of luck!

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