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More often than not, ecommerce websites’ success depends on how good it looks rather than how good it is. Consumers often judge how professional and how trustworthy an online store is through its aesthetics. There are many online retailers that are expert in their field but not necessarily expert in web development or graphic design. They know all about the products they sell, but they may not know much about, things like white space, alpha transparency, or PHP. Thus, hiring a web developer or web designer is needed.

Consider these 5 simple tips on how to choose a good designer/developer.

1. If you were opening a new department store and you were hiring a contractor to build it from the ground up, you would ask for references. No one would trust a commercial construction project to someone they hadn’t checked out. The same goes for the contractor that will be building your online store. Ask for at least three references. You would want the know the quality of their work, how they manage and maintain schedules and how easy they were to work with.
2. In any online business, an ecommerce shopping cart is a must. It serves as a backbone of your business. It is the content management, reporting tool, order processing that you’ll be left with after your designer is off to other projects. Compare carts based on their features and based on your clients needs. Once you have finalized the field of shopping carts, look for designers that specialize in the cart you want. Avoid any cart that promises you that it can have your store up and running in an hour or less. It will be very satisfactory in the long run.
3. Hire a professional that can transform your business objectives into a successful design, not the one that simply does what you say. The web designer or developer you hire should be an expert that can translate your goals and objectives into a feature-rich, customer-pleasing online shopping experience. If a designer or developer has nothing to add or does not ask a lot of probing questions about your business values, differentiators, and goals, they are either not really interested or they are not really informed. He/she should have an opinion to contribute and should add value.
4. Get a statement of work before you start with your project. A statement of work should detail the designer’s understanding of your project, spell out an estimated time table, enumerate the exact services the professional will be providing, and provide a specific price estimate as well as an estimate of how extensions or expansions to the project will be handled. If a developer or designer cannot describe the project in a statement of work, don’t hire them. It would be like trekking through the wilderness without a map or a GPS.
5. Web design and development is often a trade of the self-taught. So while a designer with a master’s degree in art should certainly know his stuff, don’t overlook a self-taught professional. If you judged him only by his academic credentials, you’d be missing out on a great professional. Experience and talent is more important than a degree.

Your website is crucial to the success of your business. By doing extensive interviewing of potential website designers and with the help of the tips mentioned above, you’re more likely to pick one that can do the work you want.

Ever visited a graphics heavy website? How long does it take to load all of the images? Makes you feel lazy or impatient doesn’t it? That’s how visitors react to most web site, they just don’t like a slow loading site or in other words, people don’t like to wait. It’s easy to just browse then close their browser tab.

Making a web design isn’t easy as what most people think. A well planned web site will have a lot of visitors in the long run. Take a look at Twitter. Why do you think it’s popular and successful? From its topic search engine? Yes, but that’s not all. From its availability among other devices and easy to use features? Yes and yes. Twitter is easy to use, it has compatibility to other devices AND it’s a very light web design. The web design is ingenious. It’s fast and that’s all that matters.

Having a fast website makes a huge difference. Compared to other websites that also has the same idea, Twitter easily wins for being the easiest and fastest website. It’s clutter free and “tweets” are organized properly. That’s how a good web design should be.

Here are 3 easy tips that will help you build a fast and simple web site.

Let your design breathe
Let your design have a comfortable feel. Don’t cram all your web page elements into one space. Let them have good spaces between them. Websites would look like a mess if you stick web elements too close together. It would also look different on other browsers and may overlap each other, so give your web design space.

CSS Optimization
Take a look at Andreas Viklund’s templates. His web designs are featured in Wordpress. CSS Optimization makes your sheets easy to understand, clean and easy to edit. How does this make your websites load fast? If you use less images and more CSS reliant on background colors, your web page would be lighter. It would also allow you to easily change your themes without going over your codes and touching HTML.

Avoid using multimedia
If your website doesn’t really need Flash or Java, don’t use them. It will only make your website look complicated and makes long loading time. Having great multimedia graphics is good but only if its actually useful and simple. Most of the time, these Java/Flash effects only makes it hard for people to access the information they want to get.