10 Tips For Avoiding Web Design Fraud

Authored By: Christina Keffer on September 17^th, 2007

Choosing where you have your website built is a lot like choosing where you are going to have your car fixed. Both situations involve hiring work out to people when you may not have a specific idea of what needs to be done, how much it will cost, or what complications may arise during the job, and both situations involve the risk of getting totally gauged and cheated. However, just like there are steps that can be taken to find a mechanic that is honest and not out to get you, there are steps one can take to find a web development company that is honest and straightforward. There are also a number of things to look for in order to avoid the ones that ARE out to get you.

1. NEVER trust people who promise Search Engine rankings or claim to have special “insider deals” with the major search engines. The ONLY thing that the Search Engines are concerned with is giving their users the absolute best search results for the key word that was searched for. That’s why you can’t buy placement on Google in the first place. Anyone who claims to be able to guarantee rankings is lying to you.

2. Beware of offers to “Submit your site to all the major Search Engines.” This is a largely useless practice. If you have to submit a site, that means it not visible by organic means such as inbound links and social notoriety. This is already a bad thing. A site should be able to be found by the SEs naturally after a few days of good search engine marketing. The only reason to manually submit your site is to get all of the individual pages indexed. It is not an absolutely necessary thing by any means, and you should not pay through the nose to have it done.

3. Always retain the ability to contact your individual web designer personally. Many firms are based in America but outsource their design work to other countries where the quality may not be up to our standards.

4. Most of the time, web design firms will have a portfolio of sites which they have either created or worked on. Don’t just look at their screen shots. Go to the websites and contact the owners to get an accurate report of their experiences with the company you’re investigating. Sometimes, illegitimate web designers will put up sites that they actually had nothing to do with in their portfolio. Do your due diligence.

5. A good web design company with a lot of experience behind it usually has a good idea of how long most of the more mundane aspects of a web site take to develop. When discussing the cost of your website, keep in mind that a good web design firm will be totally transparent. They will outline their billing procedures for you and provide an accurate idea of how long things will take. If their time estimates are drastically different than others have given you, there’s either a breakdown in communication, or they’re underestimating how long a certain aspect of your website will take to create on purpose.

6. Beware of hosting scams. If your web designers are offering free hosting for six months or a year, that is not a problem, but find out where your site will be hosted and the hosting package you’ll be getting. It’s important to know things about the bandwidth you are allotted and the processor speed you will have so that you can tell how quickly your site will load for your visitors and how many visitors you can have at a time. If you are getting free hosting, but your site is slow or always down, that’s not really a good deal.

7. If you are looking for web hosting apart from your web designer you want to be especially aware of falling prey to hosting schemes. Look out for places that charge you for a full year’s hosting up front. They usually provide low quality hosting and have no hope of keeping anyone on a month by month plan. Also beware of places that are offering “unlimited space” or “Zero downtime.” The only way you’ll have zero downtime is if they are not rebooting the systems for maintenance like security updates, and you certainly don’t want that. If the plan looks too good, it usually is!

8. Make sure that the web design company you’re looking at will purchase your domain name under your name and with your money! If you choose to leave them at any time, for any reason, you must make sure that you have control over your domain name, otherwise they can force you to buy it from them or pay a hefty transfer fee. The same goes for hosting. Before agreeing to having them host your website, make sure they will not charge you a fee for changing the hosting if you are not satisfied with the hosting you have.

9. If you’re buying or registering your domain name through the web developer, make sure you look into its history. Search for it online to make sure it shows up somewhere in the search engines. Often times, unscrupulous people will sell domain names that have been optimized using bad practices and are being filtered or penalized by the search engines.

10. Make sure the design company has a track record of producing everything they advertise. They could be really strong in the design aspects, and really bad on the marketing side of things. If you’re paying to have your website designed AND marketed, make sure that’s what you’ll be getting!

Deciding who will create your online presence is an incredibly important decision. Take the time and energy to find out what you’ll REALLY be getting. A lot of research and comparison shopping now could save you months or even years of trouble and headaches in the future.