posted by Mark

Once you have examined a web designer’s portfolio, looked for clues about their design style and understanding of usability, you can take a deeper look at their work by peeking under the hood.

Obviously, just as a non-mechanic would struggle to gauge how well an auto shop had repaired an engine, it’s going to be difficult for most marketers and business owners to tell a lot about a site beyond its appearance. For that reason, you’ll probably have to be content to use some simple tools to point you in the right direction.

Ideally, you would want to know how well a sample website had been optimized for search engines (SEO), how secure it was, whether it featured a content management system, was easy to maintain and update, and so on.  Unfortunately, these issues are a bit too technical to dig into in this short post (although we may revisit them in a future series), but one thing you can quickly and easily determine is whether their sites conform to W3C standards or not.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with W3C, check out our post from a couple of months back that explains the concept, or simply know that it’s a way of measuring how well a site is coded for access and usability for different platforms and devices. Checking any website’s score is easy: just type or copy and paste the address in the form field at: validator.w3.org and hit “Check.” One or two errors/warnings here or there is not a major issue, but when you get a report with hundreds or errors, beware.

Another quick way to tell whether a site really works well, instead of just being a pretty sample, is checking whether it loads as it should in other browsers. Good web design companies will make sure that their sites work in all the major browsers (Internet Explorer v6 or 7 and upwards, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari), and on both Windows and Mac systems.

You don’t have to use sophisticated tools to get a sense of whether a web design team is doing quality work behind the scenes – you just have to know what you’re looking for, where to find it, and why the answers matter.