With a new year comes business planning, and marketing yourself online should be part of that plan. Make part of your plan to hire a professional web designer to help you execute your vision. Here are 5 reasons to hire a web design professional rather than try to tackle building a website yourself.
1. Brand Messaging
Who are you? What does your company stand for? Do you have a perfect pitch telling your clients why you are the best? Great! Now, how do you get that message into a website?
Your online media should express a consistent brand with your other marketing materials, and even be consistent with the quality of your product and customer service. If you “throw together” a quick website, your message may become skewed, and the website may not reflect the right image of your company at all. Even large companies can be mistaken for small basement operations if their website looks questionable.
2. Well Coded for SEO / SEM
A good professional web designer knows how important search engine optimization is in today’s Internet world. An optimized website will have clean code that allows Google to read the content of the site easily, and they will pay attention to details like site maps, optimized images, and even content placement. The average DIY template program could be “unfriendly” for search engines, restrictive, and may produce messy code. As a non-professional, you may not know where to begin to make sure your website is optimized for search.
3. Saving Time and Making Money
What is your profession, really? Aren’t you busy running your own business? How much of your time-worth is wasted when you spend it working on marketing details and learning technology, instead of talking to and servicing your clients? By time-worth, I mean the value of your time as an expert in your own field. As a business person, you should be maximizing the efficiency of your own business and learning how to gain more business in your field, or how to improve your own products. This same issue occurs when you task another employee like an office manager to create the website for you; if that is not their primary job or skillset, they are wasting time learning and probably being frustrated by unfamiliar technology. (Are you paying them to learn and become behind on other projects?)
When a company tries to take on web design in-house, what often happens is that website either takes more than double the planned time to finish, or worse – it never gets done at all. (How can your website work for you if it isn’t online?)
4. Standing Apart from Your Competition
Think about how many hundreds – or thousands – of websites are out there on the Internet. Think about how many possible websites someone might come across when they are searching online for your product. If your competitor’s website is better than yours, how likely is it they will feel more compelled to contact them over you?
There are many things that define a “good” website, and your web design professional will know how to guide you through those choices.
5. Stress Relief
By hiring you for your expertise, you bring peace of mind and stress relief to your clients. You already know your product or service is the best and by trusting you for the job, your customer saves time, money, and has a solution to a problem. All of these things are true for web design, too. A great website built by an expert takes the burden off your shoulders and your employees’ shoulders, and everyone is free to do their daily tasks.
