Any company that would lie about when their web design business was started is sure to be dishonest in other areas as well. Below is a link to the InterNIC's Whois database lookup. Go ahead and try it for some of our competitors and see what you come up with. Anybody with a Microsoft Front Page editor can hang out a shingle these days and say that they do web design. Most of the companies were started virtually yesterday, and wouldn't know how to do web design at all if you took away their Microsoft Front Page editor.
Graphics are the key to any great web design.
Look for quality custom-made graphics which appear tailored to the company's clients. Kids use them, but a business should not. Besides being the crutch for a beginning web design firm, use of Microsoft Front Page editor leads to other problems with web designs. Most web editing software is biased toward the company's own browser product, and puts out code that either makes other browsers crash or limits what features they can see. Microsoft Front Page puts out pages that don't look right with any browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer.