Having a great website is an excellent way to build a business and attract new customers. When it comes time to build your website, the questions begin to form. What do you do? where do you go? Next comes the all-important question, “do I DIY it,” or “do I hire a professional web designer.” There are so many different options out there. What makes the decision-making process even more difficult is that designing a website have has never been more complex!
With so many people shopping online your online presence has more potential monetary value than your traditional brick-and-mortar shop.
In this day in age, businesses will live and die before someone ever steps foot inside a physical store. Just like a traditional store, you wouldn’t trust purchasing products and services from shady-looking e-commerce websites. If a website looks shady aka fly by night, would you trust inserting your credit card there? Probably not. Most of your loyal customers wouldn’t trust doing that either.
The unfortunate truth is, for many business owners, a website is a first and only opportunity that the majority of customers have to interact with them.
Here are a couple of reasons why you should strongly consider hiring a professional web designer.
1. A Professional Web Design Agency Will Build Your Website Using Project Management Principles.
Building a business website is a lot like building a physical, touch and feel, brick and mortar storefront. The process requires many technical tasks to be completed. Also, it requires plenty of steps and in many cases different types of design teams.
What you’re not told:
- Website builds can require a specific set of technical tools. Read between the lines unexpected additional costs. Everything from project management, picture licensing, and legal agreements. ( We use SmartTask for our project management needs)
- Coordination between various teams, agencies, and services is required. Do you even know who to call when you need to add accessibility functionality to your website to make it ADA compliant? ( Get ADA compliant Here )
- Without a proper project scope, your development process can suffer from significant scope creep if the goals and objectives are not clearly defined. This will result in cost overruns and time delays.
- A major part of any project is identifying what could go wrong. A proper risk assessment will save on a lot of headaches and heartache.
- Having a 3rd party web designer will give an impartial view of the task at hand and what is required to complete the task.
- This is a highly technical undertaking. Some parts are just really difficult to deal with … integration of an email program, payment gateway, user accounts management.
- If your business is in a regulated space such as financial services or legal services, you need to have the proper compliance achieved.
Your digital storefront aka your website, in many instances, can require a significant amount of effort to be considered successful at doing what it is designed to do. Making a Sale or Telling People How to do business with you.
Most web design projects will involve multiple components, so the best work comes from multiple people working on the components they’re most passionate about. (spinxdigital.com)
2.Web design Requires Multiple Types of Creative Designers
Another reason for you to hire a developer is creativity concerning the design. There is a lot that goes into making a website look good. Yes, you can choose a pre-designed template off the shelf, however, the chance is very high that your version will not look nearly as nice.
A visual designer is looking at graphic design features such as the image ratios, color balance, and consistency, the intent of the images themselves, the layout of the paragraphs the whitespace, and a list of other technical considerations.
What you’re not told:
- Developers often have a skill set that’s used to characterize the look and feel of a website. Pulling a template off the shelf is not going to cut it.
- Technical design creativity warrants hiring developers as well. There are front-end developers (photoshop people) and back-end developers (programmers and integrators). Each one of them adds a particular finesse to what goes into the website design.
- Developers have had access to many different websites before they started yours. They know what works well and what will not. They have put in the hours to understand how to give you the best product based on your budget.
A lot is to be said about knowing the technical side of an artistic skillset. If you don’t know about the rules of thirds and halves, you probably shouldn’t be building a website. If you want an eye-catching website with responsive design, a graphic designer should be a part of your team.
3. A Professional Web Designer Will Incorporate Website Security
With cyber-attacks continuously on the rise having concerns for your website, the security process should be on your mind. Your website is on the internet 24 hours a day 7 days a week with zero downtime. This gives cyber pirates ample opportunity to break into your digital home. A professional developer will take care of design issues related to security relatively quickly.
Here are a few common issues about website security DIYers miss:
- Establishing a digital security protocol
- Website software patching schedule
- Password change schedule
- Managing the level of access for users
- Determining if users should have website access
- Creating an anti-malware action plan
- Designing a backup and restore strategy
- Configuring all involved software correctly. An improperly configured application can cause a severe system security breach.
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A seasoned web developer will typically choose established software to install on your website.
Imagine this, there is more than one way to build a house and unfortunately, all houses aren’t created equal.
If your website were a home in the childhood story, the three little pigs, you have the option for straw, wood, or brick. Each having its advantages and disadvantages. As a business owner, you need to have design options presented and weigh the pros and cons of each. What is the risk? How much will it cost? How long will it take to create? Are there any additional benefits?
4. Website Performance And Load Speed
At one point in time having mostly large pictures and photos located throughout your website was all the rage in terms of web design. Slow load times were the result and it quickly became apparent that this was not the way to go, design trends quickly changed.
Large images even compressed take up a significant amount of data to download. Your web design agency already knows this and works on creating the best web design to give you aesthetic beauty and page load performance.
Make it fast please:
- Designers will optimize Image dimensions. Essentially, they will shrink down your files to only what is necessary to be shown. Also, that means that they will not use your entire image catalog.
- Designers, if necessary for your design, will also implement on-site and offsite 3rd part Caching systems. This will ensure your website loads just as quickly in New York or across the world in Singapore.
- Your system integrations may result in a website that appears slow. Sometimes the wrong software is being used. Other times a piece of code may have a glitch. A technical person will have the skillset to discover quickly where the issue exists.
5. Countless Websites Overlook Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization design begins at the ground level. This is not a package that you can just buy off the shelf. Design agencies incorporate it into the very DNA of your website. It is very difficult for a novice website builder to incorporate this into website designs. This one more reason why hiring a professional web development design firm is so important.
Most DIYers don’t consider these factors in their design
- Adding tools such as Google Analytics
- Image dimension optimization
- Proper file names, image attributions, and descriptions
- Caching systems CDN ( content display networks) for faster load times
- System interoperability can result in a site that is slow. Google SEO does not like slow websites. (A technical person will have the skillset and tools to discover quickly where the issue exists.)
Design companies will often charge extra for SEO services but even if you can’t afford to purchase that particular service, they will often include minimal SEO attributes into your website build. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo all gravitate towards showing SEO-optimized content from a well-designed professional business website.
“According to a study by HubSpot, more than 60% of Google users click on the first three links in search engine results.” (simplemachinedesigns.com)
6. Web User Experience ( UX / UI ) Is Very Important But Often Overlooked
A customer/user experience is probably one of the most underappreciated parts that are easily visible in every website design. The user experience outlines how visitors engage with your website. Internet users are very savvy, they deal with various platforms all day and if your website design is not in alignment with some of the key platforms in your respective market space, you will potentially miss out on future conversions or potential customers.
Design agencies like TheWebpageSite.com work with their clients to establish a clear client demographic and customer intent. The average new web prospect will visit your web page for just a couple of seconds and if your website does not provide value or function well they will close the browser and move on to the next website.
Questions developers are asking themselves when building your website
- How responsive and functional is the website physically
- Are buttons where people expect them to be?
- Can people find the content they are looking for easily?
- Will the website work on multiple devices?
- Do all of the links work?
- Is the font readable?
Are you designing your website user experience to be accessible, WCAG and ADA compliant? If you answered no, your business could be missing out on sales and communications on millions of users. ( Learn More )
Conclusion
Your website should be doing at least one of these two things. It should be doing direct sales or telling people how they can do business with you. If it is not doing one of those two things then it is not being used as an effective tool for your business.
Your website if used effectively can become a valuable member of your sales and marketing team. Often a well-designed website can supplement the work of 4 or more employees at a minimum, giving your business almost $200,000 in shadow value.
Knowing this, as a business owner, your valuable time could be better spent growing your business. Instead of trying to compete with a professional designer. You want your business to be a success and if you want your customers to think you are serious about them then your best option is to invest in a quality website with the aid of a web design agency. Again, you really want to hire an expert at building websites.
Are you are still on the fence about hiring a professional web design agency?
Design agencies like TheWebpageSite.com can easily identify your requirements and craft an actionable plan to get your website up and running.
