Difference between Freelancers and Website Design Companies Singapore
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Difference between Freelancers and Website Design Companies Singapore

Design

Specifications matter. Design is built around what your audience requires and need. Do your audience require visual stimulating website or just the content itself matter? Do you feel that you need your website look professional? All these are factors to consider when you are choosing between a freelancer and a website design company.

Freelancer

Usually when you hire a freelancer to develop a website, he will be a website developer which possess no to little website design skill. He will suggest a few website templates to choose from on a website template market .

Website Design Company

If you are looking for a professional and custom designed website, website design companies are great for you. They will usually assign one or two designers to work on your website design and submit two design drafts. From there, you can guide them how you want the website to look and feel, and ultimately lead to the finished design of your website.

Development of CMS

CMS is short for Content Management System is a back-end function for users to update what they want to put onto their website. E.g. Update their promotions panel. Depending on sophistication of the CMS, you may or may not want to hire a freelancer.

Freelancer

Most freelancers when doing CMS, will be of a popular open source CMS application as shown below. It allows the user to update simple content such as blog posts. But the functions may stop there, depending of which kind of page builder they used for your template. Also, many users of open source CMS complained the difficulty of navigating through this as there are many tabs and functions.

Website Design Company

Website Design companies will create custom CMS from scratch to suit your needs. For example, if you need a gallery, news panel, forms and posters. They will create a backend system to cater to it. This is to improve user experience and make it less confusing to navigate the backend system. Below is an example of a backend system that Elves Lab designed.

bad cms screenshot

(An example of a messy CMS)

good cms screenshot

(Elveslab's Simplified CMS)

Responsibility

Freelancer

Most freelancers offer 1 month warranty after completion of the website. This includes up to 3 major changes to the website. Including design, content changes and debugging. You may pay them after the 1 month period should you need any changes to the website. Some freelancers may not use SSL (Secure Socket Layers) certificate to protect your visitors’ information hence, you may breach the Personal Data Protection Act unintentionally. Some freelancers may use an open source software to build your website’s function, leading to website vulnerabilities. Due to the nature of freelancing contracts, they are not liable for their mistakes once the warranty expires.

Website Design Company

Most website design companies will offer a life time warranty on bug if you are on their hosting service or sign up a maintenance package with them. This maintenance service includes any rectifying any bugs or programmatic errors which you did not detect during the website development phase. Usually they are here to stay, hence, if there should be any issue you need help with, they will be contactable.

After Sales Service

Freelancer

After the website is made and the warranty expires, good freelancers will stay around to update your website at a small fee. Hiring freelancers runs the risk of them being uncontactable right after the warranty expires. Depending on your needs, a corporate site or landing page, affects whether you should engage a freelancer. For a corporate site, we encourage you to engage someone you trust or those that are recommended from other contacts you know. Whereas landing page, it is fine.

Website Design Company

After the warranty expires, you can always depend on a website company to give you 9am-6pm technical support. They will always be contactable unless due to business closure. Depending on how good you built rapport with the company, you may get some freebies such as updating some small changes to your website. (Hint: treat us well) Hence, when doing a corporate site, most small to big businesses find a website company due to their reliability. Find out who trust us here, Our Clients

Continuity

Freelancer

Freelancers will help you buy your domain name and hosting. Good freelancers will always send you domain registrar and hosting account so that you can renew yourself. Unfortunately, there are cases where the freelancer forgot to disseminate important information to their clients. As a result, the domain expire and deleted their content on their server.

Website Design Company

Website Design Company buys the domain name and maintain the hosting for you. Since the companies are here to stay, the company will usually give you three calls, one month, two weeks and one week before the expiry of the domain and hosting to confirm that you want to maintain the domain name and hosting. You also may choose to buy multiple years of hosting and domain name rights with them to save more money for the long run.

Return on Investment

Freelancer

Experienced Freelancers will guarantee return on investment on your website if you were expecting certain results from your website. Such as increment of visitors and number of enquiries. However, sometimes, you can’t find value for money amongst confident but bad freelancers. Because of the results they boast and abandonment of projects when they cant deliver. Hence, be wary of freelancers that boast results.

Website Design Company

Website Design Companies sometimes includes services that guarantees results. Such as SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (search engine optimisation). Most agencies are able to deliver what they claim due to the vast knowledge in talents on teams they have. Also, should they fail to deliver, you have the right to make them compensate you. Hence, it is a win-win most of the time.

All in all, if you are a corporate person looking for a professionally made website. You should look for a website design company. Instead of having an individual to help you, you will have a dedicated team assisting you on your technical issues (downtime of website) and design direction. Also, websites made by companies are more secure and resilient to hackers as such, many high profile companies approach them. Interested in getting a website? You can visit our website design packages in the link here. Interested in reading more? Here’s another recommended article, 3 Things you are doing wrong with your web.

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