How to choose your web agency

Great web design and great web designers are often hard to define. The reason for this is that any opinion will always be somewhat subjective. One person may like one design, another person like another. One comment we will often get from two people looking at the same design is is opposing views on whether a page is either too simple, and too busy. Different people expect different things from their websites, and based on their user experiences, they will want different approaches to their own web design.

The notion of quality itself in a graphical design for a webiste can also provide significant differences in opinion. We have often been presented with website address that clients like and would like to use as a resource for ideas and believed that the original source could be significantly improved.

We once asked a very well respected web usability and metrics expert how you measured good web design. How can you quantify something that is no subjective? His answer (he turned the question back on us and asked us 'What do YOU think is great web design?') made it fairly clear that they didn't have the first idea how this could be quantified in the marketplace. The problem is in creating a definite measure to say whether a website design is 'good' or 'bad'.

Some ideas for whether a design is 'good' or 'bad' that we have been presented with are:

• The Director of the company likes it
• The majority of people within the company like it, when compared to other designs they've seen
• The design is 'better' than their competitors
• The company gets good feedback from customers

All of these viewpoints show partial success but are all still fairly subjective. The website has certainly succeeded in its objective if the only aim was to impress the company Director. The same goes for whether the majority of people within the company like it was an objective (after all, employee buy-in is a very important part of the success of a website. Whether a design is 'better' than a competitor's website is an extremely subjective claim, because it rely's on yours and your competitor's objectives being the same, which won't necessarily be the case even if you are in the same industry. Therefore the answer to this relies again on perception.

In our view, the best way to judge whether a website is successful is by defining your initial objectives as tightly as possible, and then driving your website agressively towards meeting those specific objectives. To show how this can vary your design approach, if your objective is to create a site that can be accessed from as many different types of browsers and devices as possible, your website is going to be very different from a website that needs to dynamically show flash movies, and win design awards and get press attention for visual design.

Finally, the word 'design' in 'web design' means a lot of different things. It can refer to graphical design, layout, system design, technical design and any number of iterations. In creating a website, you need to make sure you cater for all of these factors.

Choosing the right web design company means choosing a company that understands all these differences, and can illustrate through their portfolio that they have created a variety of very different designs and not created a design by numbers, but truly understood and thought about what you want to achieve, and created something that is entirely focused on your company's requirements.

Take a look at our web design solutions for more information about how we work.

Great web 'development' is much easier to define than the notion of web 'design' . This is because good web development has much stricter and more quntifiable set of standards to which your web company should work to. Of course not all do, and this is something you will want to carefully agree with your web development company before agreeing a project with them.

Typical measures of whether web development is good would be:

• The code the web developers produce is standards compliant (those standards will vary dependent on the technology)
• If it's a website, does the website meet WAI 'A' standards (see the WAI 'A' standards information at the W3C website)
• Does the code validate (no code errors, no depricated code - see the W3C website for more information)?
• Has the developer used CSS to develop the website or built the site using tables?
• Has the developer considered and developed using the right/appropriate platform (for example, a Flash only website is not the best option for a company wishing to achieve great search engine rankings)?
• Is the code fast - i.e. has the minimum amount of code used possible?
• Is Javascript and CSS in line, or has it been carefully separated into separate files to enable fast browsing?

This is only a partial list. Many web companies can produce a website for a few hundred pounds, however it is doubtful that these considerations will have been catered for during development. The result can be that you have a cheap website ... but you get what you pay for. In our experience, low cost websites are usually templated affairs with minor differences from the last clients, developed in tables (definitely not the best way to develop web pages and indeed it hasn't been regarded as so for several years).

Of course, what you as the client have to decide is what actually matters to you. If it's your first website for your company, you could consider that having 'a' website is good enough, and perhaps you want to test the water and see how your business goes before you spend more money on your website. However, this can be a false start for many companies, as a website that doesn't meet the objectives but merely gives you a presence on the web can be money wasted. For example, if your website isn't well designed, your 'bounce' rate (the amount of people who look at your page for only a moment and then leave without exploring further) will be much higher, meaning your business will most definitely be affected. Secondly, if you website isn't as least as good as competitor websites, you won't compare to them in your visitors minds. Thirdly, if the bullet points above haven't been covered by your website development then getting your site into a great search engine position for visitors and potential customers will be that much harder, if not unachieveable.

Take a look at our web development solutions for more information of our skills, or visit our web standards page to explore how 1minus1 ensures quality in web development.

Great Search Engine Optimisation is possibly the easiest to define. However, it isn't as simple as 'my website appears in the the top ten results of Google', no matter what you may believe at first and no matter what your SEO company or SEM company might tell you.

The reason for this is that there are certain (often unethical and ultimately unhelpful) strategies that will get you great search engine results fairly quickly. However, these methods can be frustrating for visitors, are quickly phased out by search engines, and don't necessarily drive any more business to your company.

At 1minus1, our definition of great SEO is work that will raise your profile in search engines, keep that profile high over the long term, and drives new business to your company as a result. It's not just about volume, and in fact getting stuck on the issue of volume of traffic can often be misleading. In reality, it's about driving the right kind of visits to your website - those visitors that will be genuinely interested in your content and offering, and will be more likely to want to do business with you.

This isn't achieved by simply stuffing your web pages with keywords, or dropping dozens of keywords into the keywords meta-tag in your HTML, or by creating dozens of entry pages to your website that contain similar content but have keywords and phrases replaced. Instead it is achieved by four key factors

• Writing well written, informative content for your website, not just based on around your products themselves, but also around your industry
• Producing extremely well written code for your website and having a high content to code ratio
• Ensuring your code is free of errors and meets WAI 'A' standards
• Choosing a web company who understands and can help you achieve these objectives

The absolute overiding factor in achieving great search engine results is your content. You need content that helps search engines understand the relevance of your content to search engines users, and you need to great content that helps you convert those visitors into customers. If you try and 'fudge' your content by stuffing it with keywords, use text that is significantly similar to text on other companies websites, you don't have great content.

We have used a strategy of focusing strictly on content and build extremely effectively in a number of SEO campaigns.

Find out more about SEO and Search Engine Marketing consultancy from 1minus1.

Whether you are from a company large or small, established or start-up, we'd love to talk to you about your project. Call us on +44 (0)1252 720818 for an informal discussion about your web requirements.