Nowadays, designing a website is very easy, with drag-and-drop features and custom website themes available online. You will be surprised by how almost everybody, including your 14-years-old neighbor’s kid, can build websites these days. This is very okay if you intend to make a basic site to connect and share stories and photos with your loved ones. However, if you are an enterprise owner, and your goal is to get a website that attracts potential customers that eventually convert into sales, you will need professional web designers. The next issue you are going to deal with is hiring the best freelance developer for your job. With the right strategy in place, finding the perfect freelance web designer will be a painless process. Mini Big Hype has some simple process you can follow.
Contents
Define your Design Needs
What job do you need to be done? What functionalities do you want your site to accomplish? This is a critical step as it helps you decide what type of web designer or developer you will need to hire. You will likely hire an agency or someone who is a pro and knowledgeable in your specific specialization. If you get this step wrong, you will also choose the wrong freelancer who is unfit for the job.
The Type of Freelancer you Need
Now that you understand your design needs well, its time to match them with the appropriate expertise and tools. You want to ensure that the right people with the necessary skills do your job. When it comes to building websites, you will have to choose between these three experts:
Website Designers:
Web designers often work on the front-end part of the website. They design the look or what users see or use to navigate in your site. Here you will be looking for technical skills such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and graphic design abilities to get excellent user experience. You should choose a web designer if you need a basic landing website to display your products and services and not include many functionalities.
Website Developers/Coders:
These have more work than the website designers. They use back-end technologies such as databases, scripts, and APIS to code the website’s back-end part. If you want a more sophisticated site like an e-commerce site, web developers are the ideal choice. For instance, after web designers have designed an e-commerce shopping cart’s physical appearance, coders develop the logic behind the ordering of products and all checkout processes to achieve successful online web functionalities and data storage.
Graphic designers: As the name suggests, a graphic designer is responsible for creating and designing a website’s visual elements such as images, icons, logos, banners, etc. Unlike web designers and developers, a graphic designer will not code the website for you. They use graphic technologies such as photoshop to generate quality visual designs for your website.
To get a high-quality website, you’ll need a combination of this three expertise. However, it may be hard to find an individual freelancer with all these skills. Alternatively, you can hire Agency services, which will provide you will all these experts for your website development process.
Where to Find Freelance Web Developers
Now that you know the type of freelancer and skills you are looking for, where do you find them? Very easy task! The fact that you are looking for a freelancer means that you are not planning to hire a full-time team of developers. There are plenty of online platforms where you can find both website designer freelancers and agency services such as the Guru. Here you can find a considerable number of experts who do your development work.
Look for Experience
After browsing the online freelancing platform, you came up with a list of website designers from whom you want to choose a few or one freelancer. One criterion that will help to pin down your list is the freelancer’s past experience. Look at their previously completed projects to access whether they will meet your development needs. If they have portfolios browse through to be sure that’s what you are looking to get. Another source of useful information about freelancers is the reviews from prior clients. Cross from your list those that don’t meet your expectations until you find your best candidates.
Make a Deal and Get to Work.
Are you confident that you’ve found your ideal developer? Whether it’s a web designer, developer, or graphic designer, its time to get it down on paper. Ask for proposals and compare them with your budget and timelines. After the best website developer wins the deal, communication is essential to keep your client updated in every step of their website design journey. Choosing a freelancer does not have to be an overwhelming process for business owners. Follow these five straightforward steps, and you will find your business the best freelance web designers that will meet your business’s online presence needs.
