Finding Good Designers, Part 1: Consistency

Recently, an organization that I volunteered with asked “How can we find a knowledgeable web designer in the future if you’re not available to help us?” Web design and development don’t have any prominent certification paths or even a defined educational path; anyone with a computer and a basic understanding of HTML can call themselves a web designer. So, to help those looking to hire a web designer assess their prospective hire’s abilities, I’m beginning this series of posts that will show you simple techniques for spotting competent web design.

First off, any web designer worth his/her salt should have their own website. A designer who doesn’t have a website is like an auto mechanic who doesn’t own a car – it’s not impossible that they have true skill, but would you really trust someone who doesn’t use the very services they sell?

Found a designer with a nice-looking website? Great! Now the real fun can begin. The first and most basic thing to look for in a designer’s work is consistency. While it’s easy for anyone to slap together a few pages in Adobe Dreamweaver or even Microsoft Frontpage (ughhh….) and put them up for all the world to see, real designers have an eye for detail. Consistency is the most obvious sign of attention to detail.

So, what things in a site should be consistent?

• Page titles. Does the designer have a system for naming pages? (For those who don’t know what I’m referring to: the page title is the text that appears at the very top of your browser window, by the minimize / close / etc. buttons.) Be wary of a designer whose page titles are non-existent (“Untitled Page” or similar), all the same, or don’t follow any real system – e.g., one page is titled “Awesome Site | About Us” and another page is titled “Contact Us > Awesome Site”. It shows a lack of attention to detail and a “good enough” attitude toward their work.
• Layout and positioning. Do the elements on each page maintain a consistent layout from page to page? I don’t mean that the site has to use an identical layout on every page of the site; it’s quite common for a “home” page to have a very different layout from an “interior” page. But for pages which are obviously intended to have the same layout, do the elements actually show up in the same place? A poorly-coded site may have a top banner which is flush against the browser toolbar on one page, but which has a 20-pixel gap on another page. These are signs that either the designer doesn’t understand their CSS code, or that they did not take the time to “proofread” their site before making it live.
• Color. As with layout and positioning, I don’t mean to imply that a site can’t use different colors among its various pages. However, if you notice that one page of a site has a green background, and that another page of the site has a similar, but noticeably different, shade of green, it’s likely an oversight on the part of the designer and not an artistic effect. Be on the lookout for variations in color as you move from page to page.

There are a number of other things that can be analyzed – for example, consistency in internal link targets – but the three items above are good enough to serve as a general litmus test.

That’s it for today, but I’ll be expanding on this series over the coming weeks. Have you had any experiences (good or bad) with hiring a web designer? Leave a comment on this post to help others looking for designers.