Have you been screwed over by your web designer?

If you want to be a web designer, there's nothing stopping you. No training, no exams, no certification, no professional body, just fall out of bed and tell the world you're a web designer.

Indeed, it's what I did, only I did the training - and continue to improve my skills and knowledge every day, and I had serious programming experience before that, and I'm quite sure I'd pass any exam or certification process were one to exist. The closest thing we have to a professional body is the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, but even that has two routes to entry: one, which I took, which is to demonstrate knowledge of accessible web design; the other, to demonstrate advocacy of accessible web design. (If anyone doubts the case for accessible web design, please look at my SeeHearSurf site.)

All this creates a problem for conscientious designers and developers like myself. In a sea of sharks and snake oil salesmen how do you sail a true path to the Island of Good Web Design? I honestly don't know. Luck? Even relying on word of mouth "my designer did me this fantastic site for only this much" can be fraught with danger if the person making the claim has been hoodwinked themselves.

Long term, the only way is for a national body to be established to regulate the industry and Dreamberry are working with a number of reputable agencies to establish a de facto body to promote standards in design and transparency.

Short term, look at the designer's portfolio. Do you like the look of the sites there? If you search for them in Google, do they come near the top - if not why not (it may be for instance, they're in a very competitive market)? If you run the site through a standards validator like http://validator.w3.org/, are there any errors? Is the site unique? Can you get to the information you need quickly and easily? Can you read the text without any trouble? There are hundreds of factors that make up "good" web design, not all of which are immediately obvious to non-professionals.

The very easiest solution to finding a good, honest designer of course, is to get your website from Dreamberry Design!