Thinking about hiring someone to build your company a website? If so, you would be wise to consider your decision very, very carefully. Because of rapid growth and strong demand for services, there are a tremendous number of poor web design/web development companies offering services. What’s more, many of these poor quality designers and developers are charging premium rates.

In order to help find a good web designer – and avoid a “hack” – here are five questions you should always ask.

1. Tell me about content management systems. In my opinion, there’s no excuse for building a website without some sort of content management system (CMS). A CMS is critical because:

• A CMS makes adding content easy. Your SEO strategy probably dictates that you add content to your site on a regular basis. If you don’t have a CMS, you’ll have to pay someone to “code” new pages for you…and that gets expensive (not to mention tedious). Go with a CMS or go home.
• A CMS is easy and cheap to re-skin or re-brand later.
• A CMS is often easy to enhance or improve, which means updates and new features are very affordable.

While there are some situations where a CMS isn’t the best choice, these are rare. Most businesses need some sort of CMS.

2. Tell me about the W3C.

W3C stands for “world wide web consortium,” and it’s a series of industry standards for web design. In a perfect world, every website would be 100% W3C compliant. While that’s not always possible – many common site elements aren’t recognized – a good web design company can talk to you about what W3C is, what it means, why it’s important, and what they do to be as compliant as possible.

NOTE: To be clear, it’s not necessary for a website to be W3C compliant, there is no search engine benefit in W3C compliance, etc. However, it’s a good minimum set of standards that designers should adhere to.

3. What do you do to help optimize my site for search engines?

Some design companies will give you a blank stare when you ask this question, while others will talk about META keyword tags and other outdated search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Because SEO is technically different than web design, it’s OK if your designer doesn’t have much knowledge here. However, some designers are better at SEO than others, so it’s a good question to ask when you’re evaluating bids.

4. How much do you use flash or javascript when you design? In my opinion, a lot of designers are overly dependent on flash and javascript. With the latest HTML and CSS techniques, it’s possible to build a highly functional website without using javascript or flash, so I believe the correct answer to this question is “the bare minimum to accomplish your goals.” Using a lot of javascript or flash will slow down your site, make it less compatible with mobile phones, tablets, etc.

5. Will my site be compatible with mobile phone browsers? This is a big one, and depending on what your site “does” it can be really, really easy to make it mobile-friendly or it can be really, really hard. Just know that some designers have no knowledge of mobile-friendly design and struggle with this requirement. If mobile is important to you (and it should be), then look for someone who understands.

Frankly, there are quite a few additional questions that you should ask, but these five are enough to get started. You may find that, armed only with these basic questions, you’ll learn a heck of a lot about the capabilities and knowledge of any web designer. Good luck!

Jason Lancaster is the President of Spork Marketing, a Denver search engine optimization consulting firm. For free SEO advice, be sure to follow Jason on Quora or Google+.