Web design and development is a broad church. That is to say, there are competent professionals working in the field from a range of diverse backgrounds with varying levels of experience. A junior designer with a solid understanding of CSS and design principles can put together and reasonable website. Likewise, a seasoned coder with a lifetime of C#, VB, ASP.net and Perl can do a pretty good job too. If they both approach a project with a respect for standards based design, usability, accessibility and cross browser compatibility, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t hire either one of them.

But finding a good web designer can be difficult. No doubt a Google search of your local area will return plenty of listings. But who shouldn’t you hire? Here’s our favourite bad web designer warning signs:

• Your web designer uses visual editors (Dreamweaver/Expression Web) as their primary tool to design and maintain pages.
• Your web designer is prepared to work on a spec basis (for nothing).
• Your web designer talks a lot about how to get ‘guaranteed front page listings’ on Google.
• Your web designer is also a Social Media Consultant, Social Marketing Consultant or SEO Consultant.
• Your web designer still calls themselves Webmaster
• Your web designer is still in High School
• Your web designer was recommended by someone with a terrible website
• Your web designer is cheap
• Your web designer tells you to host your website with a $6.99 web hosting company
• Your web designer uses tables for page layout
• Your web designer makes extensive use of text in images
• Your web designer tells you Accessibility doesn’t really matter
• Your web designer uses Internet Explorer 6 as their primary browser
• Your web designer tells you they are experts in web design
• Your web designer doesn’t have access to both Macs and PCs
• Your web designer can’t tell you what an .htaccess file does

If your designer fails more than 3 of the above tests, we suggest you run and don’t look back.