One of the biggest issues that you are going to face when it comes to hiring a web design and development firm is finding somebody who is actually capable of doing the job. One of the biggest issues that this industry faces is that pretty much anybody can call themselves a web designer. All it really requires is the ability to build yourself a simple website. Unfortunately building your own simple website in no way prepares you for the challenges that come with building a corporate website. This can make it hard to find the right company to design your site for you.
The thing that you want to look for it experience, you are going to want to see sites that your potential web designer has designed and built for other sites. Ideally they should be similar to the site that you are looking at. For example if you are planning a large commerce site you are going to want to see commerce sites that were built by the designer. At AMOK we have experience with all different kinds of sites and would be happy to show you sample of our work.
Of course looking at the samples will do you no good if you don't know what to look for. The biggest thing that you want to look at is the ease use of the site. In particular you are going to want to pay attention to the ease of navigation. If it is difficult for visitors to find what they are looking for they will just leave and go to another site. This is something that a lot of inexperienced web designers get wrong, they focus on how the site looks rather than how easy it is to use. We at AMOK have the experience to know better.
The other big thing that you are going to want to pay attention to when you are looking at websites that a potential designer has worked on is how well branded the site is. This is critical if you are going to be successful with your site. The main thing that you want to look at is that all of the pages look the same. They should have similar layouts, use the same colors and the same fonts. This is important because you want your visitors to recognize that they are on your site immediately. Again this trips up a lot of designers who let their creativity get the better of them.
You are also going to want to look at things like making sure that the graphics are clean and don't overwhelm the text. After all the reason the visitors are there is the content not the graphics. You also want to make sure that there are no features that serve no useful purpose, a lot of designers like to add stuff just because they can. The most important thing is to make sure that you like the way that the page looks and feels.