It is a well-known fact of life that it is easier to deal with a single person face-to-face than it is to deal with an anonymous company that employs multiple employees and which, by definition, results in staff turnover from time to time as people advance in their careers. By the time a person decides to go freelance, they’ve invariably made all the necessary moves for their careers, and by using a freelancer, they’ll be able to establish a degree of stasis.
While there will always be a place in the business for highly staffed web design companies, for my money I would always use a freelance web designer out of personal choice. One of the reasons for this is that when I need to work on my website, I want to be able to communicate with the same person who worked on my site before, not one of her colleagues to whom I would have to explain all my likes. and he dislikes everything again.
My freelance web designer knows perfectly well that I hate video and sound on my website, and I have absolutely no intention of ever explaining again that ‘Yeah, I know it’s great, but it’s my website and I don’t want it, and no, I really don’t need to explain why’. It wastes my time, and when I’m running a small business, time is precious. Get in touch with any freelancer and they will recognize you by name and should be able to remember your site in their minds as you speak to them on the phone. I say ‘should’ – if they can’t, they may recommend you go somewhere else anyway! With a freelance web designer, you’re buying an individual approach to your website design: in fact, your website will become part of their portfolio so you know they’re going to do a good job for you.
When researching for this article, I visited two web designers who appear on Google. Both were self-employed and both had years of experience. The first one I clicked on, I stayed on that site for less than 2 seconds; in fact, I didn’t even wait for that person’s site to fully load. The second site I visited I spent 20 minutes on the site, reading the information there in detail, and if I had been looking for a freelance web designer right now, I would have chosen this person for sure, without even having the knowledge of cost.
Although they were both freelance web designers, I know that the designer of the first site would have produced exactly what I asked for. I suspect that the designer on the second site may have been trying to break into the freelance market of being employed by a web design company. The first company was all about what they could do for me – the second company seemed to project more about how my work could further their career. Maybe I’m being unfair, but this is how I perceive the work of designers employed by a web design company: give me one freelance every time!
