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I get this question all of the time... Why should I hire a professional web designer? Here's a serious yet somewhat tongue and cheek look at some of what I believe to be the pitfalls in going at it alone.
If you are anything like the next small business operator, you’ve invested your entire life into your business, taken out loans, and maybe now you’ve plateaued and the online world is the next frontier for you. It may be YOUR next frontier, but it has already been conquered by your competition and they will eat you up alive if you come at them with a poorly constructed, cheaply made website. Your website is the modern face of your company… It is the first contact that most people have with you or your brand, even before calling you. Don’t risk wasting time and effort on something that could potentially ruin your brand’s reputation online?
Let’s face it, professionally designed websites aren’t cheap! Neither is your time. When you compare the amount of time you will end up spending building, maintaining, updating (both content and back end configuration updates), and integrating, it will greatly exceed what it would cost to hire a professional and be done.
These days, web designers develop in an assortment of environments and Content Management Systems, and they put their expertise to use in the critical phase of development and provide you with a finished, living, breathing website that will grow with your organization; one that you have control over and can modify and add to as you see fit without their help. After all, that is the overall goal on both sides of this; to end up with a website that you know how to use and work within.
There are a whole slew of “Website in a box” companies that promise to give you what you are looking for and against your better judgment, you take the bait. They have limited functionality and almost certainly have little room to add more advanced functionality that you may end up requiring. But for illustrations’ sake, let’s say you sign up for a month to month website package through some company you saw on TV or heard on your morning commute. You’re sure about this decision after having gotten bids from professional designers and you pull the trigger and go with 800lbgorilla.com or whatever. For a fleeting moment you feel like you’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom and that you’ve just pulled one over on those “professional web developing charlatans”. You choose your template and are off to the races. You soon encounter some issues. Enter the “how to” articles from Google and you begin to realize that you’ve potentially chosen the difficult and costly path. You can’t find the answers to the questions you have and you wouldn’t know them if you saw them between the flood of “back-linking” and black hat SEO articles you’re sure to encounter. What you had assumed would take a couple hours ends up turning into days and by the 3rd or 4th day you’re still trying to figure out how to create a page.
You can forget about SEO! You may be in the minority and may have succeeded in developing and launching a site you are only somewhat happy with to find that several months later you aren’t climbing the ranks of the search engine results and capturing those leads. A professional web designer understands how to create a website that search engines will want to crawl. He knows what to do with Meta Data and how/where/when to place it. A professional utilizes SEO best practices throughout the entire process and calculates every move with the overall goal of increasing your ROI. A professional knows how to simultaneously design, develop, and optimize. They keep up with the latest trend in CSS, layouts, and content relevant to your industry. You’ve all been to a website from a Google search and clicked right off because you thought it looked poorly made. Your gut was telling you that if the site looks poorly made, the facility will be reflective of that and you were probably right. A major part of the web design process is producing a visually compelling and professional looking website; one that signals to a potential customer that you care about your image, brand, and/or facility. Not all templates are created equal and you want the website to function in a logical way as well. You need to make sure that every visitor has the best possible experience on your website. A professional web designer knows exactly where things such as navigation, calls to action, social media icons, and graphics need to be placed because they understand reading patterns and visual design.
In summary, don’t make the same mistake that your competition is contemplating. Don’t think that cutting costs on the single most important marketing tool in your arsenal will not come back to haunt you. Your customers are more intelligent than you often give them credit, and they know the difference.
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