Are you taking billable and valuable time away from growing your business and servicing your customers by attempting to build a website? These same customers will see that the level of expertise and detail is missing your self-built website and they may look to purchase goods and services elsewhere.
Would you stitch your own hand after slicing it open with a sharp knife? Why not? Because you are not an expert and don’t know what you are doing? Correct. We are not equating the skills of a surgeon with that of a website designer, but we hope you see the point.
Let’s talk reasons why you should hire a professional to build your website, embrace and reflect your brand, and help you find your voice.
Time and money well spent.
What is the real cost of a new website? Is it just money spent or is it the loss of business and users leaving never to return because of a bad experience? It is estimated that 86% of self-designed websites fail. A new business owner determines they need a website and think it is easy to build it themselves. Their business begins to grow and the strain of being the owner, the accountant, and the salesperson draw them away from revisiting and managing the website.
Time spent on good quality content and design.
Your website is your salesperson.
Did someone mention salespeople? How many small business owners are the driving force for growing their business? Hmm. I bet more than 50%.
Wouldn’t you hire a salesperson before you picked up your travel bag and hit the road?
Your website is your salesperson so treat it as such. Invest in it, support it, and just like its human counterpart, your website will sell for you.
- You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression
- People will leave if your website design and content is distracting or unattractive
- “Talk” to your visitors, customers, and prospects
Free is not always better.
Sometimes it is just free yet limiting. A ‘free-mium’ option is a basic version that is rarely enough for the consumer. It will get you up and running but not in thoughtful design. You do not want new visitors to be frustrated with you and your business before they interact or buy from you. Hiring a website designer does not mean expensive. We work with our clients to deliver the best solutions within their budgets and design a plan going forward to add those extra bells and whistles when they are both financially ready and committed to spending the time with us to reflect their brand and voice.
Creativity is not inherent in all of us.
A good designer and website developer will keep you from hurting yourself. They understand the value of your home page and layout and what it means to you and your visitors. How many times a client has said, “I asked my brother/sister/neighbor/lawyer about my website and they said I should do xxxxx.” Yes, that’s a hard no. An experienced website designer will make recommendations and embrace the suggestions your friend and family network made for you and at the same time deliver a custom solution. A website designer is your image and graphic conscience. They are the little voice that begs the question, “Are sure you want to do that?”
Professional design impacts SEO performance
Friendly and welcoming to search engines and Google crawlers, a professional designed website can increase traffic exponentially. We are designers, not SEO gurus. Always seek professional SEO assistance. (We can talk about that another time.)
Responsive design is critical.
People are living on phones and tablets and your site needs to rise to the occasion. There is nothing more frustrating that not being able to view a website on a mobile device.
- Improperly displaying products
- Tap to dial makes placing an order easy
- Grids, blocks, and layouts are easily viewable and without distortion
Technical support and quick changes made easy
Your visitors only have a few seconds when your website loads to make a decision to stay or go. Someone calls and tells you your website is not loading, or there is a 404 error, what do you do? According to Yoast.com,
One of the most annoying things that can happen to a visitor is to hit a 404 “page not found” error on your website. Search engine spiders tend to not like such errors much either….
You should be checking your 404s at least once every month and on a bigger site, every week. It doesn’t really depend on how much visitors you have but much more on how much content you have and create and how much can go wrong because of that. The first time you start looking into and trying to fix your 404 error pages you might find out that there are a lot of them, and it can take quite a bit of time.
Who has that kind of time, and expertise? We do. A website designer and her team can do it simply, quickly, and seamlessly. You won’t even know we were there.
When you are ready to grow, we can get you there quickly and easily. Enhancing an existing website with new pages, an online store, or a custom client portal are all things we have implemented for our start up clients that trusted us when their businesses were just beginning.
Do you know how to express your voice?
Not a problem, we can help.
Time. We take our time to learn about our clients whether we are creating a 30-page website or single page site for a startup. Great website design and content takes time.
The first thing we do when we create a website is talk about you and your business. We begin to map out the layout of the website and what you wish your message to be.
Then we write. We create a content manual for you to review all the content that will be placed on your website. This affords us time to review, edit, and ensure we have captured your message and marketing goals. Then we build it.
Are you ready to hire a website designer?
We are ready to build it with you. Contact us at findyourvoice@putanotherway.com and experience professional and website design services reflective of you, your team, your brand, and your voice.
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