There are things bad designers could do to rob us blind. They could ask for a variety of fees
- Email management fees: These fees could be applied if clients use multiple email accounts with moderate to high traffic. In reality, it is possible for small business users to use Google Mail accounts without affecting their credibility. This should give the opportunity for employees to get one email account each, without getting separate email server, which can be quite expensive to operate. Often, it requires more than $100 per month for business users to operate email accounts.
- Initial Consultation Fees: In this case, web designers will consider themselves as experts and any discussion with client could be considered as a consultation session. There are web design companies that charge money for each money clients sit down and talk with them. It means that it is possible for web designers to charge is before they start the actual work. This will increase the amount of costs they require to modify our website. In the long run, it is possible that web designers will cause us to spend much more than we anticipated.
- Phone Consultation Fees: This can be a significant component of costs, because web designers will charge us for each minute we spend on phone. They may even charge us for getting a yes or no answer. We should avoid web designers that charge excessively in terms of communication. We should consider changes that we need to apply in our website and consider whether we will need to consult with web designers often about changes that we need to apply. In some cases, our website could perform poorly due to technical issues, such as inefficient navigation layout. In this case, we should make sure that web designers won’t charge us because we want to report some issues.
- Search Engine Submission: It is debatable whether we really need a search engine submission service. It is actually a simple thing to do and often, our website will be automatically crawled by search engine bots if it has interesting, unique webpage. Unfortunately, this is something that some web designers tend to charge. It is actually a free service and shouldn’t cost any money. There are free submission tools that broadcast our website to major search engines and social bookmarking services. We could do this for free and it is a bad idea to ask web designers to do this for us. It is even better, if web designers agree to do this for free.
- Tracking and Reporting: There are tracking and reporting tasks that we need to consider. Actually, this service is free, as an example, Google Analytics, is one of the best out there. It is available for anyone with Google account. We could access Google Analytics after we set up our new Gmail account. We could open Google Analytics and gain a lot of new information that’s also available from many other commercial tracking and reporting services.