Deciding between building your own website or hiring a professional website developer?
Stop, read and understand the advantages a professional website developer brings to your business.
Individual, efficient, cost-effective, fun, easy to use, easy to find… these are all words and phrases that come up time and time again when business owners are asked what they want from their online presence.
Do these words accurately describe your website?
Anyone can acquire a website address, choose a theme and get going. But it takes a professional website developer like Design Garage to ensure your website is giving your business the very best results.
A professional website developer will look at things like:
- SEO
- Functionality
- Branding coherency
- Cost-effectiveness
- and User Interface.
Let’s take a look at each of these key tasks in more detail:
SEO
There’s no point having a website if nobody can find it. An expert understands the mechanics behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how it can help your website. The better the SEO, the further up the Google search page your business will appear. And as you probably already know, when your business doesn’t come up on that first Google search page, it generally won’t get clicked on at all. A professional website developer strategises your keywords, metalinks, text and images to get the best SEO possible and beat the competition.
See our blog “Google; How to Improve Your Ranking” for a basic tips on SEO
Functionality
Quite simply, what does your business need your website to do? Do customers want to order online? Does your product line need frequent updates? Does your website need to remember who its visitors are? Every business is different and a cookie cutter website theme plucked from a generic provider will probably not deliver the effective solutions needed. A professional website developer will build your website specifically for your business needs and customise your requirements to suit. They can also build in additional features such as e-commerce or email sign-ups.
Branding Coherency
Branding is what sets your business apart from the rest. Your website needs to reflect and enhance your business brand – from the images you choose, to the colours, the fonts, the text and the overall style. If your website looks unprofessional and incoherent, it’s very easy for potential customers to click away.
For more information about branding read our blog “Branding – Why is it Important?”
Pricing and Business Support
An expert can help you work through the costs of your website project. You could choose to own your website outright by paying for your website, domain name and hosting. Or, you could make ongoing monthly payments to a subscription service. You may not actually own your website in this scenario – so if your subscription provider goes belly-up, all your content will too. Will you build and maintain your website? Or perhaps you’d rather your developer made all the ongoing updates? These are all things to think about and discuss with your website expert.
User Interface
If your website is hard to navigate, takes ages to load, or freezes for no apparent reason, you will have given your potential customers ample cause to click away. There’s nothing more frustrating than a website that doesn’t work properly. Your developer will ensure that your website is a dream to use, keeping customers happy right from the first click.
If your website needs improvement and you’re looking to upgrade, or you’re just starting out on the web and need a helping hand, contact Casie at Design Garage, your website development experts.
