Sometimes (very often), it happens that a Animation Services web agency presents itself very well. Maybe they have a nice website, eye-catching brochures and that “holy man” air of digital marketing that can actually become very persuasive.
They make proclamations, they tell you that you are unlucky because you have a “showcase” site and they claim they can change your life by bringing results. As a condition, however, they require you to make a new site because what you have is ugly, outdated and full of problems.
It is absolutely not said that they are not good, but it is important to know how to judge their work and evaluate if the promises actually have the conditions to be kept.
What do they offer you?
Are they just talking about website or strategy? Do they provide in-depth consultancy defining goals or do they only talk about technology and graphics? Do they offer you a website or a media channel?
If there is really the intention not to limit yourself to the creation of a website but a true digital identity with a quantifiable purpose, make sure that the proposal does not hide a “hit and run” attitude.
Do they keep you updated on the job?
Updating does not mean telling you “where I am” but explaining the reasons for the choices made. A structured web agency proposes a document that includes graphic mock-ups and separates the graphics from the user experience, assists you in the production and setting of the content and carries out adequate benchmarking with your competitors and above all, organizes a methodical testing activity.
Do you receive a level customer experience or do they try to sell you the completed implementations?
Not insignificant details…
Sometimes the capabilities of a web agency can be seen in the details.
- Did they insert the favicon? The icon that appears on the browser is a detail but if it is forgotten it starts to suspect.
- Did they customize the page titles right away? Did they only think about the home page? Having a custom title as well as well-made Meta descriptions doesn’t mean SEO. These are measures that must absolutely be present in 2020.
- Did they use a theme already done by limiting themselves and modify it where necessary or did they produce a graphic that was functional to the objectives? Doing two searches on Envato Market or entering your home page on Google Images to see if there are sites similar to yours is an action to take.
- Did they resize the images? Make sure that the site does not have too heavy images and in general, check the upload speed of the site with a tool like Speed.io. A slow site affects indexing but above all it is an indication of lack of attention.
- Graphics and Usability. It is one thing to make a site aesthetically pleasing, it is quite another story to define navigation paths with calls to action that facilitate the user experience and therefore the achievement of objectives. Press your web agency on this topic.
- It is one thing to create a responsive site, one thing is to make it usable from smartphones and tablets. Check that the user experience also concerns the responsive version and that a “mobile” strategy has been designed.
- Broken links or pages not to be indexed. After the delivery of the site verify the links of your new site by typing “site: nomesito.com” on Google. If pages that shouldn’t exist have been indexed, perhaps without content or with the classic example written in Latin … you have the right to be angry.
- If you have a site that is being replaced, have you made sure that a link re-direction action has been planned or are there pages of the old site left lying around? Migrating from one site to another is very important in order not to have negative SEO impacts, especially in order not to lose incoming links.
- Did they propose you a traffic building strategy? Did they integrate social plugins wisely?
- Did they review the content? They have set the paragraphing in HTML (H1, H2, H3 etc. tags are essential to make the content google friendly).
The purpose of this article is simply to provide a few simple tips to enable you to evaluate the quality of a job, even a basic one.
It is good to be wary of a project that costs too little if this means compromising and jeopardizing the achievement of the objectives and therefore the return on your investment.
A website should always be accompanied by a digital marketing strategy and an advertising activity aimed at ROI. Otherwise, it will be another showcase site a little more beautiful than the previous one
