You obviously know the importance of having a website for your business, but maybe you don't know what questions to ask a potential web designer regarding the services they will provide. We will try to answer the most common questions here as you search for a professional web design service that is right for you.

How Do I Choose a Web Designer?
The best way to familiarize yourself with a web designer is to spend time at their own business website. As you review the work of a web design company, ask yourself:

These are the types of questions to ask yourself while you shop for a web designer and research their web site placement and client designs. It's not just about the price, it's also about originality in design and concept, and successful delivery online. If you don't like what you see , the web designer probably won't be able to do much better for you.

Why Should I Hire a Web Design Professional?
With the advent of do-it-yourself HTML software, it is relatively simple for anyone to create a functional web site. We all know someone who designs web sites as a sideline using "Do-it-yourself" web design software. This also explains why there are so many badly designed web sites - if someone has a paintbrush, it doesn't make them Michelangelo?

Let's look at the following scenario:

The Result: Your website might not have the professional look that is evident in your other marketing pieces, plus your site could be cumbersome for website visitors to navigate and the pages take too long to load. Your website might also have a "cookie cutter" look.

The Real Problem: From their first impression, your website visitors do not take your business seriously and they decide to take their business elsewhere.

Web Design is a unique design medium and requires extensive knowledge in designing graphics specifically for the Internet. The optimization of each page for the search engines is ongoing since all of the search engines change their algorithms and indexing methods constantly, requiring a great deal of continuous education. Properly marketing a website online continues long after the launch of the site and, again, online promotion requires a lot of time, of which you might have very little to spare!

So, hire a professional web design team - it will save you time and money in the long run.

What is a Fair Price for Web Design?
The average web designer quotes an estimate based on $60 - $125 per hour. The proposal you receive will be a "questimate" at best and you will more than likely end up paying more at the end of your design project than originally proposed.

At James Royce Web Designer, we specialize in websites for businesses with a smaller budget. Our prices are very competitive and we quote all of our projects as a package flat fee so you know in advance what your project will cost you. All future maintenance is billed at $65 an hour, which is very competitive for professional services.

What is Included in the Price?
Make sure you ask the web designer what the proposed price covers. It should include the page layout, image and logo manipulation and transfer of your pages to your web host.

If a web designer quotes an hourly fee, remember that your final invoice might be higher than your initial quote, plus there might be hidden fees for search engine submission and other miscellaneous services.

At James Royce Web Designer, we offer package pricing so you know up front what your website project will cost.

What are META tags?
Every page should have three META tags in the header of your web site: Title, Description and Keywords. META tags are an important part of your page which allows your web site to be found by search engines and directories when someone performs a search. You should never have to pay extra for META tags.

How Do I View META Tags?
You can view META tag formatting on any web site on the Internet by viewing the HTML source code on the web page. If you're using Internet Explorer, visit the home page of your web site. Click on View | Source and your Notepad program will launch with the HTML source code in text format. You should be able to see at least three tags in the top <HEAD> tag - Title, Description, and Keywords.

How Can I Find You if I Need You?
We provide our clients with our email addresses and phone numbers so that they can contact us at their convenience.