Web Design Q&A

It all depends on how much you need out of a website and how skills your designer is. Heck, even location can make a difference in how much you need to pay. On average, a website designer will cost $75 per hour to hire. 

However, that's the average. The vast majority of web designers will charge between $27 to $100 per hour. On the lower end of the spectrum are designers who often hail from developing countries or who are just starting out. On the higher end of the spectrum are people who have made a name for themselves in web design and also act as developers.

More than qualifications I look for genuine, happy customer reviews and a good portfolio of work with a design style that I like.

Here are some tips for optimising your site on Weebly
 

1. Make sure your meta titles and descriptions are descriptive and on point.
2. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
3. Write good content that will drive traffic.
4. Don't use the meta keywords section on the backend. Google doesn't take these into consideratin anymore.
5. Make sure you have a really good internal linking system in place. This will help search engine move through the site a lot easier.

SEO for Weebly is a bit harder than other Content Management Systems like Wordpress because of the limitiations it has. CMS like Wordpress has access to a lot of different plugins which can help the performance whereas Weebly is a bit more limited. 

In saying that, as long as the theme code is clean, you've done all the neccessary research to find where your target market is, and you create a site that is visually appealing with good content, you should do well.

As Tabitha has discussed, there are many pros and cons to hiring a website designer and going down the DIY route. Website builders like Wix, Shopify and WordPress are cheap - with monthly subscriptions typically starting from as little as $10 per month. Mind you, that fee doesn’t include the SSL certificate, website hosting, domain name and custom theme options. All in all, the DIY option is going to cost between $300 and $500. 

The biggest downside of DIY website builder options is that you are limited as to what you can do, and unless you have an eye for design and time to build the site, it may not align with the vision you had for your website.

If you need a custom-built website that is highly functional and user-friendly, hiring a professional website designer is probably the best option. Website design costs boil down to two factors: the size and complexity of the project. However, on average small businesses can expect to pay from $3,000 + for a custom-built website.

 

Joel's suggestion is a good one, however, if that route doesn't seem to get you moving in the right direction, you can always upload the files manually into the correct folders within the Wordpress structure.

This can be done with an SSH approach or by using an FTP client. Again, this is a less than ideal approach, but if the suggestion above isn't getting you traction it is definitely an option.

Great question.

I have never worked on this website personally, but Amazon is a great example. If you use an online tool called The Way Back Machine (its like a visual internet archive) you can see what their website looked like when they first launched. It was dreadful (as most websites were in the early to mid 90s).

Once Amazon started selling more than books, their site quickly got a lot more "noisy" both in the amount of navigation and products to filter through.

After several iterations their design team created an optimal checkout paradigm (the 1-click checkout for signed in users). They went so far as to file trademarks and patents around the process. By lowering the barrier to checkout for frequent users they made impulse buying much easier (for better or worse on our bank accounts).

There was a second combination that become the knockout punch for online buying. It was the algorithm they created to display products other people bought (or ones you previously looked at) next to what you were about to add to your cart. This can get a bit creepy at times, but it lead to much higher conversion rates. I don't have specific stats on it, but this has become a pattern on other ecommerce websites as well.

As a bonus, in the Search world, I think that is why Google as a late arrival to the Search game compared to (AOL, Excite, Lycos, Yahoo, etc.) was able to disrupt them. All the other search engines at the time had very busy page layouts with much too much taking the focus off of search. Google came on the scene and only put their name and the search field. This seemed contrary to all rivals but it worked brilliantly.

This is because sometimes being a service that does 1 thing extremely well, is much more beneficial than trying to be all things to all groups of people.

We outsource all our work overseas. oDesk has gotten REALLY expensive for good designers because design work is hands down the easiest thing to outsource, so you're competing against cashed up VC funded US startups.

In order to get competitive rates, we've found going to specific job boards in various locations has worked -- we've hired from Domestika in Spain and zip.lv in Latvia, generally looking to pay around the USD $20/hour mark.

The output will always depend on your own "art direction" but some examples of stuff we've done recently are:

https://www.rentingsmart.com/
http://www.decalmarketing.com/ (our own brand)
http://www.theprocedurepeople.com (our own brand)
http://www.streetuniclothing.com/
http://campaigns.noffs.org.au/donate/
 

It takes a bit of effort to find someone that works well with you and your own management style, but I've always found that with the right processes and management in place outsourcing overseas is pretty stress free (it was tougher at the start ;)

Hi Heidi,

If you're selling online then you will probably have an automated email that goes out to your customer on purchase. You can customise the message to send them a direct link to your Google Review page or back to Facebook page, or in other words, make it really easy for them to give a review in the first place.     

The second part of having them automatically displayed on your website is (as the other contributors have mentioned), going to come down to a 3rd party tool or plugin. I'm using Repuso, which I like for the fact that you can configure feeds from multiple sources.

Feel free to give it a try.

https://repuso.com?via=mark91
  

I personally haven't employed any. However, web design and front-end development are both skills I have. I've also partnered with more technical people in the past. What type of information are you looking for? Or what would you find helpful to know?