Establishing a strong online presence is not an easy task. That is why businesses seek the services of a professional web development team to create their web presence and promote it further. But is it not as easy as it sounds. The success of a web development projects highly depends upon your choice of the service provider. While a experienced team can provide you great deliverables, a wrong choice can land your online endeavor in a total mess. That is why it is very important to devote quality time to research about service providers and once you have a good amount of options, interview them just as diligently like you would any in-house employee. Here are some things that you need to ask them before signing on the dotted line.
What is the Level of Technical Knowledge?
Ask them is they are familiar with HTML, CSS or XHTML. HTML is the basic root of web development. If they do not understand and are not proficient in HTML, there is no way they can even build a website let alone build a good one.
Do they follow SEO Considerations?
Search engine optimization may be a post-development procedure. However, if you want your website to be search engine friendly, you need to keep some SEO considerations during the development phase itself.
Would the website be Cross Browser Compatible?
XHTML and CSS are vital to ensure the cross browser compatibility of websites. Cross browser compatibility is a very important consideration. This is because your visitors may use various browsers to access your website and to cater to all of them, you need to make sure that your website functions well on all the major browsers. If your website looks great on IE but is a mess on Firefox, you will end up losing all your Firefox visitors.
What is the Average Load Time of their websites?
Slow loading websites are a major turn-off for Internet users. And people don't usually visit a website again if it has made them wait the first time. This is why it is very important to optimize your website so that it loads faster and performs well. Check with the potential web development team if they have expertise of employing optimization tools and strategies that help fasten the load time of your website by optimizing the images and the underlying code. Faster websites equal to high visitor retention rate. Go through their portfolio page and check out the websites they have designed in the past. See how much time they take to load. This would give you a hint about how good the company makes websites.
What Server Side Programming Language do they use?
When you want a professional website for your business, it is but obvious that you would incorporate interactive features like Comments Box, Sign Up for Newsletters and so on. The potential web development team should be familiar with one of the other common server side programming language and know how to use it efficiently. Some of the common web programming languages are Adobe, ASP and ASP.NET, JSP, PHP and Perl.
What type of Database do they use?
Databases are used to store important website information like articles blog posts, email addresses and all. Popular databases include Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, MySQL, and Oracle. These databases are generally supported by major web programming languages.
