How to Hire a Web Designer Who Won’t Run Out on You

Many challenges come with hiring a web designer; keeping them such that they don’t disappear into thin air is one of them.

If you’ve had a lot of experience hiring a web designer, you’ll agree that some will promise the world, then disappear with your website design after payment; others will disappear when you request revisions on the submitted design.

Weeks go by, and you’d hear nothing from them; if you’ve experienced this happen often, you’ll begin to ponder about what keeps happening.

You are not alone on this, in the next couple of minutes you’ll get to see some helpful tips that can help you manage the next web designer you hire so that they do not run away without completing the task.

These are some of the tips that will help you hire web designers that won’t run out on you:

• Pay Well
• Hire Based on Recommendations
• Check References
• Get a Solid Timeline
• Start Small

Pay Well

Web development is like any other service you pay for. Generally, you get what you pay for. If you go looking for discounts and low-priced designers, expect to get the runaround. If you think about it, it makes sense that low-paid designers aren’t motivated to spend a lot of time on your project.

Maybe they needed the money, and so they took on your project. Then, after realizing how much work it would be, they moved onto the next one without finishing yours.

The solution is to spend as much money as you can on this side of the project and hire an more expensive web designer. It won’t guarantee you get the results you want, but it will usually weed out a lot of the shady people.

Hire Based on Recommendations

Get a recommendation from a friend or from web design forums. If you know someone who had a good experience with a designer, you almost don’t need to check references because they’ve already done a good job for someone you know.

When you get a recommendation, ask about the experience they had as well as the result. Don’t just ask whether they were happy with the person. Many people say they’re happy because they don’t want to bad-mouth the person directly. However, if you ask someone about their experience, you give them an opportunity to tell you the facts surrounding their business deal. In that sense, it’s not personal and subjective.

They may tell you things you would never otherwise hear too, like whether the designer missed deadlines or delivered a design that wasn’t quite right but was “good enough.”

Check References

When you can’t get a recommendation, check references the designer gives you. Ask for at least five references. If they don’t have at least five, then move on to the next candidate. You want someone with experience working on your website.

To be safe, try to also get references even when the designer is recommended; this way, you can see the quality of the web designer for yourself.

Ask about the person’s experience, then match it with the references provided.

Get a Solid Timeline

It’s usually difficult to nail designers down on deadlines. However, you can get them to give you a timeline with milestones. This way, you know what to expect with milestones and throughout the process. If a designer can’t give you a timeline, then don’t work with them.

Milestones let you set mini-goals for the designer and make it easier to set soft deadlines. If you want to improve the odds of those deadlines being met, have a clear end-goal and subgoals for your project.

For example, come to the designer with a wireframe or at least a sketch of how you’d like the website to look; all the designer has to do is build it for you.

The more you change your initial design after the designer starts working on it, the longer it will take. Also, the price usually goes up because changes are being made to the design after the agreement.

Start Small

Give the designer something simple to work on so you can see what they’re capable of. For example, have the designer build a simple website. Don’t go crazy with it and begin asking for a full membership website with shopping cart integration.

Ask for a basic three to five page website with a contact form, intuitive navigation, and maybe the ability to accept payments through third-party merchant service providers.

Wrapping Up

Finding a web designer isn’t easy as the barrier to entry is so low; therefore, almost anyone can call themselves one. However, if you comb through a person’s references, ask around, and are willing to pay top dollar for work, you should end up with someone you can trust who won’t run out on you.

Let us know if you’ve had bad experiences with website designers in the past, maybe you can save someone reading this.