Everyone is after the best web design company in the world to enhance online presence and bolster business prospect but it is pretty tough to sign a truly dependable best web development company. However, if we shift focus from the consideration of best and worst and to our own objectives as start-ups, or midsize or international business organization, the quest can be a lot easier. This will help to find out if the company we intend to sign up is capable of designing a website oriented towards the goals or end objectives. And it is needless to say that almost all the objectives take user experience into account, in some form or the other.

In this process to assess the suitability of a self-proclaimed best web development company, we must know what their best practices are and what worst practices they can resort to for cost cutting or any other purpose. We should also ensure that they do not use any technically unacceptable web design tricks.

• Consistency in design across all the pages

Though it is a very basic rule of a web design company, it is one of the most vital ones as well. Users often negatively react to a web page which has a look completely different from that of the home page. A professional web designer must make all the pages appear uniform by using design elements in a consistent way. These design elements generally include header, footer, navigation system and logo.

• Text legibility

Using a very creative typeface is not a brilliant move if the text is illegible. Web design company often fails to assess the legibility quotient when they are obsessed over making a website highly creative. But the crucial fact is that if texts are illegible owing to the use of crazy fonts or background colors, the website will be unable to deliver the message.

• Graphic concentration

Graphics have always been a key to good web experience for users and the best web development company never tires out while experimenting with graphic tweaks to attract users and retain them on the pages. But injudicious use of graphics can play exactly an opposite role. The bottom-line of graphic usage is that it should accentuate the theme and not overpower it.

• User-enabled graphic effects

A best web development company often tends to use flash animations, videos and pop up windows etc because they think such generous effects will appeal to a visitor. But on the contrary, an unsolicited pop up can suddenly block a section of the content a user is trying to read. This will create negative impression and might force the reader to leave the page. Instead, users should be empowered to select these effects and start them at their own convenience.

• SEO features

If sufficient SEO features are not built into a website, it will lose its share of organic traffic. The designers must use appropriate keywords, alt tags, meta descriptions, image captions etc to make the texts and graphic components search engine friendly. Besides, a sitemap must be generated for both user navigation as well as search engine spidering.

Some of the worst practices of web designing company clients need to be aware of

• There are a lot of apparently best web design company that still use the primitive markups instead of using the latest versions that are fully supported. If your web designer is not using XHTML, bid him adieu.

• Web design companies are also very fond of developing tabled layouts. But ideally and technically as well tables should be used for framing content and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for developing interesting layouts.

• A web browser displays web pages on the basis of its interpretation of DocTypes of every page. In fact each of the pages of a website needs to use one of the DocTypes but web developers mostly ignore it. The result is lack of support for different browsers.

• In order to give websites good search engine ranking, web developer often seek to make the search engines happy by stuffing keywords in the content. Content must be relevant to the queries of visitors. Keyword stuffing is overtly unethical and your web designer must not do it.

So, when you are in your quest for the best web design service provider, do research a little to know about the practices of a web design company.