Why use a Professional Designer?
There are many reasons to use a professional web design company for your new website. Listed below are some of the main things to look for in a web design company.
Avoid the cowboys
As with many professions, there are unfortunately many ‘cowboys’ in the web design industry in New Zealand. This is partly due to the low cost of computers, and the easy availability of non licensed or pirated software. As a result, almost anyone with a computer can potentially set themselves up, and call themselves a ‘Web Designer’. Many of these fly by night web designers lack genuine design skills and design qualifications, as well as technical server knowledge, and as a result have given web designers a really bad name. This has also resulted in a low perceived value of good web design. Always make sure that you choose a web designer that has a broad selection of designs in their portfolio, and that the designs look professional. Also always check that any company you get a quote from has licenses to use their particular web design software. Design Lounge uses the Adobe Creative Suite of products to design all of their website’s, which is the industry standard software.
Aftersales service and support
Another major thing to consider when choosing a web designer is, are they able to offer you support after your web design has been completed. This means are they still going to be around in a year or two. A large percentage of web design companies fold before the end of their first year, and aren’t able to provide help when the client needs to update their website, leaving their clients out in the cold.
Why should I use Design Lounge, over other Web Design Companies?
Firstly, unlike some other companies, we don’t have free seminars and pushy sales people, trying to hard sell a range of standard website packages. Instead our clients contact us with their requirements, and we put together an individual solution tailored to their needs. This means that we don’t have anyone pressuring a client to sign up with us. We have also heard that there are web designers out there, who cold call New Zealand businesses, and pester them to sign up to their services. We know how much people dislike receiving cold calls, especially with so many phone scams around, so we don’t believe or participate in this practice.
Secondly, we don’t have any long term service contracts, so we don’t lock our clients into a long term service contracts. Infact, apart from the initial web design/setup fee, and the initial hosting and domain registration fees, there is nothing that forces our clients to remain using us, except if they using a SaaS (software as a service) system. Many web designer’s now operating lock their clients into contracts ranging from 12 to 36 months, where the client must pay a fixed fee every month. We believe in being upfront about costs, and don’t believe in locking clients into long term contracts. The only additional fees we charge on top of the initial web design fee, is the monthly web hosting fee, and the annual domain registration fee. Any additional work or updates that a client requests, is simply charged out at our normal hourly web design rate.
Thirdly, Design Lounge is one of New Zealand’s pioneer web design companies. We are proud to have been in business since 2001, which makes us one of Wellington’s most established and longest serving web design and hosting companies.
