What makes a great web designer?

I have had clients tell me in the past that when they had their first website built that they didn’t have a clue about what to look for in a great web designer and they usually received a less than satisfying experience. So, I decided to write this article in regards to the topic.

• A great web designer will ask you for the purpose of your site so it can developed accordingly.
• They should ask for a menu structure, images and textual copy for each page.
• You should be told that the text for a page needs to be at least 1000 words and laden with the keyword or keyphrase the page is about (at least three times.)  http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html is a great tool to check to see if people actually searched for a particular keyword or key phrase in the last month. [More info]
• You should be told that all images should be renamed the keyword or key phrase (hyphenated) of the page subject that it is for. (Example: baby-carriage-1.jpg, baby-carriage-2.jpg, etc…)
• You can also repeat the image name in the alt tag and title tag ( via wordpress admin for the page or post edit if the later is what you use or via the html editor; Example: Baby Carriage 1, etc…) Note: never take images from sources like Google images.
• All text needs to be unique and website text for marketing purposes on other sites needs to be different then the text on the actual website.  The reason for the later is that duplicate content on websites gets a penalty in the search engines.  www.copyscape.com is a great tool to make sure that your copy on a website is unique.
• A great web designer develops a site for you written in clean and valid code. The later is very important if you need your website to be cross device compatible.  http://validator.w3.org/ is a great tool to see if the code that makes up a website page is valid. Search engine spiders do not like indexing badly coded websites, hence the site might not get the rankings it deserves.
• You should be informed that Adobe Flash is no longer a cross device compatible medium for websites and JavaScript image slideshows are not viewable on old mobile devices.
• A great web designer optimizes every image found on the website.  Load time is part of the search engine algorithm and an issue with less then perfect mobile phone connections.