What to look for in a Volusion web designer

The marketplace for ecommerce web designers is a diverse one. I’ll break down the competitive arena to show you who the players are for Volusion web design:

1. You have the highest level designers, which typically work with enterprise level clients.
2. Then, you have designers that work with small-to-medium sized businesses, which is where 1Digital currently falls into place.
3. Then you have boutique design shops.
4. Finally, you have freelance designers that advertise by their small network of friends and relatives and over Twitter and sometimes LinkedIn.

Quality vs Price

Quality should always be your first priority when considering which agency or freelancer to go with. Generally (and there are always exceptions to this rule), quality improves as you move up from freelancer to enterprise-level designer. However, there are some important deviations to note. For example, if you are a small to medium sized business, you won’t find much if any difference in quality between an agency like ours that charges anywhere from $2000 – $10k for a custom Volusion design and an enterprise servicing agency that charges $23 – 50k for the exact same project. You’d be wise to stay away from prices like these (which is usually a moot point as this range is well outside the budgets of most small to medium sized businesses). Since these top level agencies are used to getting projects from enterprises with huge budgets, you need to pay a heavy price tag to get their attention. But their valuable time is the only thing you’re paying a premium for, since the quality is indistinguishable from agencies actually modeled to service small to medium sized businesses.

Speaking of the reverse issue, be extremely skeptical of anyone offering prices that are too low. There are a lot of aspects that go into designing a unique, robust, and reliable Volusion ecommerce website, even if you aren’t getting any custom integrations with other systems or databases. Consultation and communication takes time and money. Custom design, something that reflects the style of the current year and incorporates all the functionality your business requires, takes planning, invention, creativity, talent, feedback, approval, implementation, and so on. This all adds up to a considerable investment, and to be prepared you need to understand what an acceptable range is. Once you determine that an agency falls within that range, you can proceed to scrutinize their value proposition. I can tell you from experience, anyone offering a complete custom Volusion design for less than $1000 should be a huge red flag for you. Even $2000 should get you no more than a very basic site, less quality begin to be compromised.

Language Barrier

Moving on to less tangible criteria, take note of the service you get when you call an web designer (by the way, if they don’t have a website with a direct line to a human, keep looking). Does the person answering speak English? Do they speak it well enough to understand perfectly? Are they located in the United States, or from whichever country you are calling from? I’m not saying non-english speaking designers and developers produce substandard work, but it can be a nightmare trying to communicate with someone in charge of something so precious to your business as the website if they are not a native speaker of your language.

Experience with Volusion

Note how much experience the designer has with the Volusion Platform. Are they a certified Volusion Expert? How many Volusion websites have they designed? How familiar are they with Volusion’s API? A good developer will be able to work magic with Volusion API integration to get any external systems you have communicating with your site. I would stay away from designers that primarily do informational sites, because ecommerce is a separate beast that takes programmers that are familiar with Volusion to design sites for. It’s easy for a Volusion designer to create informational sites, but not necessarily easy for a informational designer to create a Volusion store.

Portfolio

This article is not necessarily in order of what you should ascertain from prospective designers, as my next point is to look at their portfolio, something you can do before or after determining whether their price is sketchily low, egregiously high or quite reasonable. I’ve done extensive competitor investigating, and I was pretty shocked to see that competitors that charge up to five times our rates have portfolios that could be interchanged with ours without a difference in quality noticed by either side. Check that the portfolio is easily accessible. See if the Volusion design examples are of the quality you expect for what you are prepared to pay. You should be very cautious of portfolios of designers in the lower price bracket, for it is a well known trick for some to place a screenshot of a beautiful site they did minor development for but did not actually design, and the viewer naturally assumes this is a representation of their skill.

Payment Breakdown

We love when clients pay the balance up front, but we wouldn’t dare to ask anyone to do so. We break payments into milestones, so that there is a give-take relationship that builds trust between ourselves and our clients. It also reduces the burden that many small businesses have when investing but don’t have liquid capital immediately available. Take it as a red flag when you see any designer demand full payment up front.

Service

Circling back to the service of the designer – make sure they can explain how things work. Transparency is paramount in this kind of a transaction, because it is a lengthy and involved process that demands regular and open communication to achieve results befitting your business and investment. Does the salesperson ask about the story of your business? What is the consultation like? Do they seem to really care or do they just want to hurry to get you to sign? The vibe you get from a web designer is important.

Full Service Agency

1Digital Agency is, if you’ll pardon the tautology, an agency, so we will come across as partial when we recommend agencies over freelancers or boutique design shops. I hear it frequently when we get calls from people tired of the headaches that come from hiring amateurs and undermanned designers that struggle to pull off what an agency can do with ease as well as economies of scale. A full service design and digital marketing agency is even better, as they are equipped to handle your SEO and PPC after the design of your site, and using the same company puts your SEO management at an advantage because they are already familiar with how your site works and was designed. But I’ll talk about what to look for in an SEO management team in a later article.

To recap, the main points you’ll want to examine in a Volusion web designer are the quality of work, the transparency and care of service, and the acceptable range of price. As I said before, I have spent countless hours investigating dozens of competitors, because we want to know that our service and work is the best, and if it isn’t, we acknowledge it and make the adjustments to give our clients work that is better than our competition for prices and a quality of service that makes them irrelevant. So choose wisely!