It takes immense talent and skills to design a web page which is creatively designed, neatly coded, easily downloadable, displays properly on different browsers and above all, can be indexed easily by search engines as well.

This is why it becomes so important to choose a company which has a team of talented web and graphic designers, equipped to give you a high quality web solution.

Here are some useful tips to help you choose an efficient web designer.

Check out previous work

Ask the company to show you the portfolio of their web designs. Most good web and graphic design companies will have a neatly done portfolio in their website itself.

The prior work of the web designers highlight not only their talent but also what you can expect from them. Analyze whether all the pages. Are easy to navigate?  Are the websites impressive and professional? Is the layout effective, etc.?

Only after you are satisfied with the previous work, should you move further in the process of engaging the web designer for your project.

The importance of HTML knowledge

Make sure that the web designer uses both HTML and XHTML to build a site along with cascading style sheets (CSS). The knowledge of CSS is important for a designer as CSS allows the designer to easily and quickly make system-wide changes to the site.

This approach helps in saving time and energy and of course, cost. A good website designer must be in the know of these things. If your designer is not familiar with CSS, then you’d better leave the task for some other designer.

What website features do you need?

Inquire what kind of features your web designer can provide you in your website. There are plenty of features available in web solutions today but you must know what exactly you would need. Your web designer must be able to suggest you the features that would make your site attractive and user-friendly.

For example, if you are building a product-selling site, you can have some flash components to enhance the appeal of your home page, a good admin panel to manage visitors and sales, security features to ensure secure payment gateways and so on.

Updating criteria

It is essential to know beforehand, how the web developer and graphic designer plan to have the site updated.

It is better to have the ability to update the website on your own with the help of Content Management System (CMS), or user-friendly admin panel type interface which allow one to make changes to static content.

Paying the website designer every time you need to update your site is an expensive proposition and quite unnecessary in today’s hi-tech web world.

Performance of your website

To make sure your website performs well, ask your designer beforehand about the time required for loading a page and search engine indexing. If your site takes more time to load than the average website does, take it as a warning signal. It might be due to bad HTML coding. A good web designer will code the page in a way in which it loads within seconds and is easily indexed by search engines.

Get in touch with previous clients

Apart from just going through the testimonials online, it is worthwhile to get in touch with the website designer's previous clients you are considering.  Ask them about their experience with the web design company and the web designers. You can contact them either through phone or e-mail them seeking their opinion whether they were happy and satisfied with the kind of quality and service they have received.

These are just few guidelines that can be taken into consideration while looking for a good professional web designer. These are by no means the only criteria but it will surely help you to find a great resource who can be trusted with your dream project.