How to choose the best web design company in 2023

Most business owners are looking for a web design company to redesign or revamp their company's website. However, there are too many options out there, which makes it difficult to find a quality web design company at an affordable price. We've compiled this list of the best web design companies in Malaysia based on their work and services offered. Whether you want an entirely new brand identity for your business or just a few new features added to your current site, we need to choose a quality and qualified web design company from among the many options out there.

Here is some Tips to choose a best web design company that’s the right fit

Know your objective

First, you need to have the objective and target, why you need a website? What you want the website to help you, a website for marketing purpose or just company information. Marketing website or Corporate website, you should know which is most important to you.

Know your budget for web design

If the website is built for corporate website. The corporate, small and medium company should have a fix budget, funding to run a marketing or to build a corporate image. Based on the budget allocation, you can tell your web design agency or web designer freelance 75% to 90% of your actual budget. Start pursuing agencies, the agency will give recommendations for the website service that you can get under your budget, they may also suggest other web design options to achieve more success. That means you and your agency wins, and that’s a great way to start a successful relationship with an agency.

Here is some tips to allocate a budget:

1. A website that is being built from the ground up will cost more, because it will take longer time and effort to create.
2. Website going to be on a platform like WordPress will cost less.
3. Custom made CMS website or be completely made of HTML code will cost more.
4. Adding to an already-existing website will cost less.
5. Depending on level of customization & length of project

Reading Index

1. Get pricing, fees and charges
2. Exploring the competence based on the meeting
3. Web Agencies and Freelancer, their past clients
4. Ask who will be personally responsible for your site
5. Customer support and who can update the website
6. Web Hosting Service
7. Set concrete, achievable criteria with deadlines
8. Summary conclusion

1) Get pricing, fees and charges

It’s still uncommon to find web design pricing listed online, even for the best agencies out there in Malaysia. Cheap and price lower doesn't mean is poor quality but is the way of how the web design agency providing service to the customer. Most of the agencies will not publish the pricing on the website. Getting or selecting pricing from amount of web design agencies can take a lot of time, especially for agencies that offer different packages or non-packaged services. 

The best agencies in the industry usually prefer you to contact them to get information on packages or service, and sometimes they won’t give you that information until you tell them you like to work out a web design strategy. Why web design agencies would not tell you the pricing directly on the phone or via email. Because they are qualified they need to understand your requirement before giving the quote or advice. But some web designer or freelancer will tell you the pricing directly if your first question is to ask for the pricing, because they know your concerns is the pricing not the value of service. 

Here is some tips asking the fees
        1. Do you charge for making unscheduled updates to the site?
        2. Can you wind up spending more for an unscheduled checkup on your site?
        3. How you charge hourly, monthly, or for the whole project?
        4. Is there a limit to the number of design revisions?

Different companies will charge different rates for their web design services.  It’s difficult to put an exact price tag on how much a website will cost. However, you get a ballpark figure for how much a website will cost you in a range, on top of that, ensure the following items must be included in your new website.

1. Project manager
2. Responsive website (Mobile Friendly)
3. Fast website load time and page speed
4. Content structure design
5. Sales lead eform & call-to-action feature
6. Minimalism design concept
7. SEO Compliance
8. Website Analytics
9. Web page optimisation
10. Web system support & maintenance
     

[ Web design packages & pricing ]

2) Exploring the competence based on the meeting

Technically that you need to call them to set up a meeting for better understanding of the project goals. A competent agency will be allocated an experienced web consultant to visit you and he/she will be proactive to understand your project objective/goals on top of that, a qualified web consultant should be able to provide with comprehensive solutions to what you’re looking for.

 What should you need to know more about the company?

1. Company background
2. Web design year of experience
3. Strong portfolio & experienced team
4. What is the process flow
5. Project Timeline
6. Support infrastructure

3) Web Agencies and Freelancer, their past clients

The best web designers in the world will have a strong web design background, and understand everything from color schemes to graphic design. Every established web design agency or web freelancer will have previous clients. Strong background is one of the most important factor. Ask for examples of sites with similar goals and features. The web agency's example and portfolio will show you what you can expect from an agency. Look for a company that can get to show you a wide range of designs. This indicates a healthy creative philosophy: a company that listens to its clients, considers the brand, and doesn’t take an one-size-fits-all approach to the design process. How to evaluate the web design agency's portfolios.

[Study & understand the background of the Web design company and freelancer]

4) Ask who will be personally responsible for your site

The person handling for your website is important, When you work with an agency you have to get the name and contact information for a representative who is personally responsible for seeing that your site gets the attention it needs to succeed.
These contacts can be project manager, project admin or solution consultant. These levels of contact person will not pass blame among its employees and make excuse after excuse for why you’re not achieving your goals.
A lot of web design companies farm out the various parts of a project. Perhaps the firm you’re considering is a reliable partner company. Or maybe it’s an ad hoc team of freelancers who have never worked together before – and who may not be there down the road.

The sequence of  best selection as following:
    1. The entire team is in-house and works together on similar projects all the time.
    2. There is a partner company involved, but everyone has worked together on similar projects.

[ Experienced Web design project management team]

The best web design team listen to your Ideas and knows how to communicate their ideas so that others can understand. Often time, when you have a vision in your head, it’s hard to communicate that exact vision to others. 

For any site with meaningful goals, you should look for a team of specialists. If the team is in fact just 1 or 2 people, ask about their capacity to handle your project. Are they going to be busy selling new clients while working on your site? How critical is your project to them? Getting a team of specialist in the price will be higher, it depending on your budget. Some “company” you’re speaking with could in fact be one person offering to sell the project, do the analysis, design the site, program it, and manage the server.

5) Customer support and who can update the website

A good web design agency they will have online ticketing support system to manage a you need. If something goes wrong with your site, you be able to contact them to fix the error.  

Sometimes web design package or plan includes the web content management system (CMS), a web design agency will set you up with the tools (CMS) you need to make direct changes to your website. The content-management tool, that makes it easy, fast, and free to update text, upload images, and add pages. Even if the site includes a content-management tool, certain types of changes will require a professional programmer or designer like add new forms, change animation, or create new types of page layouts.

If you can make changes to your site directly, that’s great! And if you are busy a business man or marketing person don’t want to deal with the site at all, you can sign up for web content update service with the agency and entrust the agency to do it all for you. 

[Web maintenance & support]

6) Web Hosting Service

Find out if they’ll relocate your site, in some cases, a web design agency may not work with your existing hosting service & online video hosting. Instead, they may host it themselves or switch services to another company that they’ve contracted as an exclusive provider.

In the event that they’re going to move your site to another host, you have to know. Website have to portable can host out of agency's host.

7) Set concrete, achievable criteria with deadlines

Setting concrete, achievable criteria with deadlines are very important. This kind of scheduling and outlining gives you a way to monitor the progress of your web design agency.
If your partner is ahead of schedule, then you know you chose a skilled partner. And if they’re lagging behind, you might want to consider talking to another agency.

Concrete criteria include quality like defining whether or not your website will be accessible on mobile platforms, how many visitors you want to support at any time, when your site will launch, a regular maintenance schedule, and more.

Creating the perfect website (comprehensive) for your business includes a lot of steps. The design company will first have to understand in detail, your goals and vision for the project. They’ll then have to do research, propose wire frames, revise wire frames, build out and develop the website, and of course make final modifications. With all these steps included, most websites take at least 3 to 5 months from start to end. However, time may be slightly longer or shorter depending on your goals, your designer, and other variables.

There are just so many variables that it would be hard for even an experienced expert to get too specific in answering this question. But if a company has done similar projects, they should have at least a general sense for benchmarks.

8) Summary conclusion

Find the best fit for your needs, web design company or web designer freelancer? The project sizes, small budget build for simple website, huge budget build for a comprehensive website.
Follow-Up tips: good web design agency will never turn away your questions or give you vague answers. Get the 15 checklist to select a web design agency, figure out what is the web design trends & how to define a good company website.