When to hire a web designer

Many webmasters have websites that could be improved with a new design. Perhaps the websites look dated, with design styles from the previous decade. Or maybe they just don’t measure up to the competition.

Should we redesign them ourselves? Or should we hire a professional web designer?

The answer depends on several factors:

• The purpose of the website
• The current template type and quality
• Our web design skills
• Our level of interest in web design
• Our available time
• Our budget
• The success of the website

The purpose of the website

The importance of a quality design depends on the purpose of the site. Is the website a hobby site, an informational site, or a business site?

With a hobby site, part of the fun can be in designing it ourselves. However, site visitors may view the content at informational and business sites as less credible if the design is amateurish. With business sites, our image and livelihood depend in part on first impressions.

The current template type and quality

Does the site use a website builder, a pre-made template, or a custom design?

Some newer website builders offer excellent quality templates. With convenience, though, we have limitations. Do the limitations outweigh the convenience?

All types of templates can vary in quality. Some questions to consider:

• Is the design aesthetically pleasing?
• Does the design enable good content organization for your current and planned content?
• If the site is a business site, does it look at least as good as the competition’s?
• Is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) used to specify fonts and colors?
• Does the site coding validate according to W3C standards?

Some of the above won’t be important to everyone, of course. CSS and valid code help pages load faster, and CSS rather than deprecated markup uses less coding, which can help search engines crawl the site more efficiently. But many successful sites have deprecated markup and code with errors.

Our web design skills

If we can’t do a good job and need the site to look better, paying someone else to design it is the logical choice. Why waste our time trying to do something we aren’t skilled at when we could be using the skills we already have?

On the other hand, if we have time to invest in improving our web design skills, we have a website waiting for us.

One option is to hire a designer or programmer to work on some aspects of the site while we do the rest. Perhaps we’re good at graphics but need other people to do the layout, CSS, and programming, for example.

Our level of interest in web design

Some webmasters enjoy working on their websites, while others just find the experience frustrating. If we’re in the latter group, well, we hire people to paint our house, repair the roof, fix the car, alter our clothing, and so on. We could probably do some of these things ourselves, but if we aren’t interested in doing them, we pay someone else to do them. If we aren’t interested in learning how to do web design, we pay someone else to design our sites.

Our available time

Designing a quality website takes time. Learning how to design one takes even longer. Our website may be a project for us to work with to improve our web design skills. But unless we’re already skilled at web design, we’ll need a lot more time to design a site than a professional web designer would.

Our budget

Web designers cost money. If our website doesn’t help us make money, paying for a professional designer may not be financially worthwhile for us. If our site is a business site, though, a professionally designed site could pay for itself.

Or, we could use a ready-made template and hire a web designer to customize it for us — at much less than designing a custom template from scratch. We might even find a template that suits us as is.

The success of the website

If our website attracts as many visitors as we could hope for, and if the conversion rate is high enough to suit us, we might not want to tamper with success. Sometimes a design that is less slick has more appeal.

But if our website is drawing traffic but site visitors are just landing and leaving, improving that first impression could use some work. A new, quality web design may be the first step in improving conversion rates.