Starting or redeveloping a website for a small or medium business is a very tricky task. Identifying a good Web Designer for the work and an acceptable price are just some of the issue you my face. When developing a Small-Medium business’ website a designer must appreciate that the customer base is likely going to be more local to regional. As such the web designer should build for that customer base and also promote to a wider national scale. For example a local wine bar website should have personalized local details maybe photos of the local area, or photos of local events that they business has sponsored or taken part in.
This localized free can work really well with small to medium business websites, these may not be high on the online search engines for generic terms be should rank high based on locality. In my experiences this has made the difference between a normal one man tree surgeon company and one now currently hiring over 5 staff. A good website design can make the difference between having a customer based through word of mouth and having real regional dominance in that industry.
When looking to hire a Web Designer look for one that has other regional scale business websites in their portfolio. If you know a local business that has a high ranking website on search term based on your locality find out who the website designer was. Normally I would expect for these types of small scale websites the Web designer should be self-employed or have a small specialized team. In my personal option I would only look for designers with in a regional scale. This will give you the ability to meet the Web designer face to face in meetings. This can be the best way to access the progress of the Website and the overall Design.