Filipino Web Designers

You may be considering outsourcing your web design to the Philippines.

A website designer creates the layout, visuals, text, and navigation for your website. As a small business, your website design has to capture and communicate your brand or online identity. Do that right and you can compete with even large corporations. Website design makes the business world flat. No longer is it tilted in favor of the Big Guys.

Advantages of Hiring Filipino Web Designers

At the top of the list is that the wage scale in the Philippines is lower than that of India and other nations in Asia. That makes outsourcing web design more cost efficient than doing it in-house.

. That means they understand exactly what you mean when you describe your target markets. They can provide suggestions how to most effectively communicate with those customers. Nuance is what they have down cold. Meet here Filipino marketing communications expert Joven.

The third plus of outsourcing to the Philippines is the work ethic and loyalty. Filipino workers partner with you in your business objectives. They are hoping for a long-term relationship with your company. Usually web designers are multi-skilled. In addition to the design part, they frequently are available for web development, search engine optimization, and social-media marketing. Therefore, after working together on the design part of your Internet Marketing, you and that professional can partner on other tasks.

You can check out the web design talent on Onlinejobs.ph. There are more than 800 resumes listed under “Webmaster.”

9 Best Practices for Recruiting, Hiring, and Working With Filipino Web Designers

The design of your website is your number-one marketing tool. It is how you meet and greet prospects for your business, current customers/clients, and the media. Your brand starts there. Therefore, the stakes are high. You must be willing to invest the time and energy in recruiting, screening, and working effectively with your Filipino web designer. Here are 9 best practices:

1. Place a help-wanted on Onlinejobs.ph which outlines your needs in detail. That will prevent much of the frustration of sorting through applicants who do not have the experience and skills your company needs.

This is a sample help-wanted for web design:

Experienced Web Designer – Work from home, email. Available during regular business hours West Coast Time Zone, U.S.

Our family business operates both brick and mortar retail and ecommerce for plus-size clothes for females. For 25 years our brand has been: Your Beauty Is Our Business. Our marketing messages communicate fashion, affordability, and integrity.

Your job is to re-design our current website. Competition is this niche has increased. The user flow, layout, fonts, and graphics have to reflect fashion web trends in 2015.

You must have:

• Three years documented experience in websites for apparel. Provide links to work you have done and a list of references.
• Knowledge of branding.
• Mastery of conversational American English, including what is used in marketing communications.
• College degree.
• Computer, high-speed Internet connection.
• Ability to “think” like our prospects and customers.

To apply, please send a detailed cover letter, links, references, and resume to _______________

2. Review many applicants since they will provide you unique information and insight on web design. One of the benefits of recruiting talent is that you get to “pick their brains” about everything from the nuts and bolts of web design to trends in graphics. The initial cut may be about 40 or 50 resumes.

3. How to select candidates to interview. In their cover letter, you will pay attention to:

• Did they send a generic pattern reply or address what they determine are the needs of your particular business? Toss generics. After all, you described your enterprise in detail.
• Click on the links to their previous work. Is there a range of approaches? Do their approaches demonstrate an intuitive understanding of branding?
• Did they establish rapport? You will have to work closely with this professional. There is likely to be lots of back-and-forth in opinions about what messages seem to be conveyed by the color or navigation.
• Was their written American English conversational? The tone and content of cover letters should entail a personalized pitch. It should not be totally formal.
• Contact references. Ask about creativity, attitude, ability to accept feedback, and complying with deadlines, budgets, and confidentiality.

4. Conducting initial interview. Usually there will be two interviews. Both you will conduct via email.

In general, Filipinos are not comfortable with the phone or video as in SKYPE. Since this task – that is, web design – does not entail facility in spoken American English, any interviewing via voice/video is not necessary.

The first interview will be comprehensive. Filipinos are timid and deferential in their professional interaction. Therefore, you will be gentle and caring in how you frame interview questions. No aggressive or combative interrogations. It is in your self-interest to draw them out. That provides the information you need to make the right selection.

At this point, it is appropriate to pose questions about the nuts and bolts of how they do web design. To do this, you have to be up-to-speed on the fundamentals of web design. You cannot enter this without some background knowledge. You can acquire that information base by reading articles on the Internet.

Based on what you have learned about web design, you will be able to pose interview questions such as if they operate from free web design templates or custom-make their own from scratch. Ideally, they will do both. That gives you the option to decide whether to save money by going with a standard free template or pay more for a customized one.

Also, include a request for one off-the-cuff idea about how they would design the website to both attract traffic and turn those browsers into buyers.

Inform them of the deadline for when you expect the answers.

At the end of the email, let them know that you will get back to them in X number of days.

5. Creating a paid test. You will send a friendly note to those whom you decide not to work with. For the rest, you will propose a paid test. The standard payment is about $20.00. The objective is for them to demonstrate that they understand your marketing needs. It could take the form of a mockup for the website or a mini proposal.

Based on the results of those, you will select a handful for a second brief interview.

6. Conducting second interview. The objectives of the second interview are two-fold.

First, you want to check out that the chemistry is good between you and the web designer. Therefore, you will have some personal questions such as what is most important to them in life. If they say it is following a certain sports team and you are an intellectual, the fit probably will not be good.