Whom to Hire? Freelance Web Designer vs. Pro. Web Design Company

Freelancer website designers are generally cheaper and website design companies are generally more reliable. Not to say that exceptions do not exist – but this is what the common trend is. Whom you should hire is a function of your working style and the type of website you need.

Here are few questions you should be prepared for while hiring  a website designer:

1. Does the website designer have relevant work samples & references/testimonials to show you?
2. Will the website designer deliver within a set timeline? And how fast is their turnaround time in terms of making edits to the website
3. Will the website designer give access to your website?
4. If the website designer is hosting your site, will they provide access to your site if things go south?
5. Will you own the website or not ?
6. Will the website designer be available to make changes later once the website is completed?
7. Does the website understand what is a conversion focused website i.e. a website that has right call to action along with relevant content & pictures.
8. If your website going to be mobile response or not?
9. Is your website page load time optimal? Too slow websites may not rank very well and have a high bounce rate
10. Does the website designer understand aspects of SEO without which the website may not rank very well on search engines

Take a look at the following insights before you make your hiring decision.

The advantages of hiring a professional website designer:

• Freelancers may not be able to provide all the supporting functions of a website

A freelance web designer will usually only build your website for you. At best, they will have the coding skills necessary to get a website running in addition to designing it. It is rare to find a freelance web designer who also does the content marketing for websites they design.

As a result, you will need to hire more freelancers to do the SEO, content writing and other digital marketing activities for you. And when you are hiring so many different people to work on a project, you end up playing the part of the project manager, thereby wasting a lot of your own bandwidth that you could have used more productively.

Web design companies, on the other hand, give you an all-inclusive deal that combines web design, development, content creation and SEO. Established Toronto web design companies have experts in each of these fields working with them in the same office (usually) and it’s the manager’s job to get the entire team to work together to give you the best web development experience. At Pat’s Marketing, we do this seaming together of various functions exceptionally well and deliver to you a website complete with all the marketing and technical support it needs.

• Website design companies take more accountability than freelancers

An established Toronto website design company has more at stake in terms of their reputation than an individual freelancer.

While freelancers have an easy way out of troublesome projects, which is, vanishing mid-way, companies will stick to you and take your project to completion. At Pat’s Marketing, we have had a fair share of clients who come to us with their websites half complete due to a freelancer ditching them, and we have done our best to help them out of the crisis.

• Web development companies in Toronto offer better after-sales support

Websites require maintenance & changes. A designer can guide you on taking care of some of these chores by yourself but for others, you need a professional tweaking up things from time to time.

A freelance professional web designer is less likely to offer these after-sales maintenance chores than design companies. Therefore, if you are building a complex website, website designers from a company like Pat’s Marketing will be a better choice for you. We provide periodic support and maintenance to all the large websites we build.

• Many freelancers lag behind in terms of technical nuances compared to professional companies

Freelancers are their own bosses, which means, they don’t have a more experienced ‘boss’ guiding them. While dealing with a young and relatively new designer, this may be a hindering factor to the actualization of your project. This is because, when designing a website, apart from a good design, you need to ensure the site is technically superior as well. It should load fast, and the development part should be taken care of really well so that there are no glitches for the user. Technical expertise and generic good judgement in case of practical problems are precious – a web design company is better equipped here than freelancers.

Moreover, web development technology evolves in the blink of an eye. Some of the tools necessary to keep up with the pace may be too much of an investment for a freelancer. An established company may, therefore, be a better choice if the most advanced of technology is what you seek to incorporate in your website.

The advantages of hiring a freelancer:

• It might be easier to co-ordinate with a freelancer

When you are outsourcing your project to a freelance individual, you work with just that person. You need to explain your requirements to them alone and they will be the one working on the site from first-hand knowledge of your requirements.

Within a company, you may have to communicate with different people at different stages of the project and iterations of what you want may become necessary.

• Freelancers are cheaper

A freelancer can build your website at lower costs than a company. For websites that do not need too much maintenance and complex functionality, hiring a freelancer may be a good value for money decision.

So ultimately its the question of CHEAP or RELIABLE? If cheap is your answer, freelancer is good. However, if RELIABLE is your answer, go with a professional website design company that will help your business scale. Good luck with your search!