With so many cheap services and tools available that allow you build your own website, how do you determine whether you should hire a professional web design agency?
Drawing from years of experience and customer feedback, do-it-yourself and dime-a-dozen website creation platforms may not help your online business as much as you think. The science of online business is more complex than simply creating a website. Oftentimes, business owners fail to realize this until after they have already invested significant time and resources into the project.
You may be able to create a usable and attractive website, but if it is not optimized for the search engines, it will never be seen by your potential customers. If visitors do find your website and the user experience isn’t intuitive, visitors won’t convert to customers. No conversion equals no customers, no revenue and no profits. Let’s consider how hiring a web design agency can help your site succeed.
Website design and functionality
Compare developing a website to creating a Bob Ross painting. Ross can create beautiful artwork with easy brush strokes, telling everyone they can easily do it, too. Realistically, making a painting like his in 30 minutes is far from easy. In the same way, you can’t expect your website to perform well without proper experience in the field. Web design agencies can leverage best practices in website design to create a work of art. They have the technical knowledge and professional tools and resources to develop a successful website.
Modern web design relies heavily on the principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines look at all design aspects of a website to determine its credibility and rank on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The smallest mistakes in design, like a missing comma or semicolon within the hundreds or thousands of lines of code, can take down a website completely. Can your staff implement or troubleshoot URL redirections, 404 errors, retargeting pixels, JSON-LD scripts, Google Analytics or Schema? Someone who doesn’t have web design experience will not recognize issues that may arise and they won’t know how to find the mistake. They will likely spend many hours searching for answers to resolve the issue. The lack of troubleshooting experience and website optimization knowledge will create a completely ineffective marketing tool.
Time is money
As mentioned before, business owners often fail to recognize the complexities involved in successful web design and will only realize this after much time and resourced have already been invested in the project. As with most businesses, “time is money,” so the objective to generate revenue, as quickly as possible, is why you would hire someone with specific expertise to get the job done right the first time. Businesses end up losing more money by trying to build a website on its own.
When a company uses a staff member for a different purpose other than the hired position, the business incurs the indirect costs associated with the loss in productivity for the original hired position. Additionally, this staff member is now working as a website developer and being paid to work in a position that is not their area of expertise. An inexperienced website developer could easily take two to three times longer to create a website and on top of that, the website they create is unlikely to be the functional website that a professional website designer would produce.
The road to success
Website development teams know how to build websites, because this is their expertise and what they do day in and day out as a profession. They know what questions to ask you about your business to ensure that your website not only reflects your business objectives, but that it has the best design, functionality and systems integrations required to increase your conversion rates. Doing things right the first time is less expensive than the alternative. The faster an online business can gain traction, the faster it can start generating revenue.
Most web design firms and agencies will offer a free consultation to help a business owner understand the scope of their website project and provide estimations of the costs along with the best way to get your business online and generating revenue.
