If you are anything like most local business owners you have a limited budget that you try hard to use wisely. The idea of having a high-quality website designed by a professional may seem like an unwise way to use your limited dollars.
If you think about it, your website is your digital storefront. In this internet connected age your website is your online representative, your online storefront. Your online visitors judge your company by what they see, or don’t see online.
First Are you professional? Do you to quality work? Do you write and speak well? Are you easy to work with? Take a look at your website with fresh eyes. If you knew nothing about your or your company how would you answer these questions?
Because you have limited funds for discretionary purchases, on the surface, it seems like a good idea to opt for a DIY solution to design and build your website. Yet, like anything else, taking the cheap route may save you some money now but will deliver poor results in the end.
Let’s have a look at some of the reasons explaining the importance of hiring professional services for designing the website of your business rather than relying on the DIY tutorials and methods.
A Professional Look
While the tutorials may help you to build a working website, but the professional look will be missing. Since a website serves as a reflection of the business operations; hence, a gaudy or dull looking website will create a negative impression of your business and the result will be lesser traffic and customer interest.
Customization/Personalization
With DIY methods for building a website, there are limited customization options. On the other hand, if you are hiring professional developers, you can get your website designed the way you like. You can add the specialized features that will help your website to serve the visitors in the most efficient way.
Poor SEO Performance
SEO, the analytics that determines the ranking of the website on the search engine, is continuously evolving.
The bottom line is that SEO is a complex topic that requires enormous amounts of time and testing to get right. In addition, the platform and host you choose can enhance or hurt even the best SEO efforts. DIY websites tend to have poor SEO performance due to inferior hosting and/or platform and poor SEO technique. Hiring professionals to create your website will use the latest SEO practices to gain visibility for your site in the results of search engine. In addition, most of the DIY website builders use old SEO-unfriendly systems, which hurt the chances of your business website appearing in the top search results.
A Time-Consuming Fair
Most of the DIY website builders advertise that they can produce quick results. However, most of the time, this is not the case. In truth if you are a novice user, they are easier to use, at first. Then, after a short time you will experience great frustration when trying to create a great business website.
If you are like most local business owners you don’t have enough time in the day now; imagine adding a few hours a day for the next 3-4 weeks to get your business website up and running. However, hiring a professional, in addition to producing better a better result, your website will be up and running in the given timeframe with little involvement on your part.
No Ownership
The content you are posting on your website that is created using DIY builders no longer remains yours. Most of the DIY website builders have this clause in your terms and conditions section that states that your contract with that company can be terminated at any time, without any major reason. It implies that your website can be taken off at any time i.e. one day your website is up and running and the next day you don’t have control over anything.
To sum it up, the best options, without any doubt, is to a professional for creating the website for your business. The expense of hiring a professional may seem costly at first and my only become obvious to you once the website is launched and the feedback starts rolling in.
In upcoming posts, we will include survey results to give you a better understanding of what is important to customers and prospects visiting your website.