Why Consider a Website Design Professional

Over the past several weeks we’ve looked at the importance of a small business website. We also looked at why a Facebook Business page isn’t a substitute for a website. You need a place to call your home on the Internet that you control.

Today, there are several options to building a website. There are build it yourself sites. Several of these sites make it easy to drag and drop things into place and have a respectable looking website. Or maybe you have a friend that dabbles in tech and can build a site for you. Or maybe you sign up for a shared hosting account and have a go at it on your own.

Or you can hire a professional website designer. Today we are going to look at why you might want to hire a pro for your website instead of choosing another other option. You might be surprised to find some of the value a professional designer can bring to your business.

Website Ease of Use

Ease of use for a website is vital to its success. A successful site can help generate more revenue for your business. If you choose a designer for your website they will bring their expertise to the table on how to make your site easy to use. This can range from the layout of the menu structure to font choices to the use and positioning of graphics. Even color choices can impact how your site is perceived by your potential customers.

By utilizing a designer that has been there and done that before, you can help increase the successfulness of your website. This can save you, the business owner, days and days worth of trial and error in zeroing in on effective site design.

Website Compatibility

Today more and more people are using mobile devices to search the Internet. These people are potentially looking for services you provide. Did you know that Google ranks mobile friendly sites higher in search engine rankings than non-mobile friendly sites? A professional website designer is very well aware of this fact and will make sure your site is responsive and mobile friendly.

There are also many web browsers in use today. Internet Explorer, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and more. A website designer will take steps to make sure your site looks good regardless of web browser in use. To be accessible, your website needs to look good from the web browser of your customer’s choice. Do you have the time to do this testing?

Search Engine Optimization

You’ve designed a great looking website, but now you need people to come see it. A key to this is to rank well in search engines such as Google. If you can rank higher than your competition you are already gaining an edge over your competitors.

A professional website designer knows how to structure pages in a way to improve your search engine results. We’ve looked at some of this in an article on website optimization for do-it-yourselfers. The tips in that article are all great ways to improve your search engine results.

Now ask yourself do you have time to keep up with those tips? Google is notorious on changing their algorithms on a semi-regular basis. In some cases their changes penalize the “old way” of doing things. Do you have time to keep up with those changes and then act upon them as the algorithms change?

A website design team partnered with your business makes it a point to keep up with these changes. They will know how the digital landscape is changing and proactively make changes to help maintain your search engine ranking.

Content is King

This section ties in with the Search Engine Optimization above, but is important enough to deserve its own section. A key way to bring traffic to your site is through content. Search engines like sites that update on a regular basis. They index sites higher that provide the search engine user value. These two things tie back to content.

A website designer can help determine your content marketing strategy (and if your current designer doesn’t talk about content – you might want to start looking around). Content can be used to show your expertise in an area, help answer customer questions, and draw traffic to your site.

Make yourself useful to your customer and the search engines will reward that. A professional designer will help you navigate this realm and tailor content both useful to your customer and refined to help your search engine ranking.

Website Analytics

Do you monitor your analytics? You do have analytics running for your website, right? There is a wealth of information to be gained by monitoring your website’s analytics. How are customers finding you? Organic search? Social Media? Direct referrals? Are they using desktop or mobile devices? What search queries are they using to find you?

All of these questions can be answered by regularly watching your analytics for your site. This can be challenging to keep up with, much less understand how to adjust your strategy based on this data. A website professional can help make sense of this and regularly fine-tune your website strategy.

Time

As you can see, there is a lot more to having a website than just putting up some clever text and pretty pictures. At the end of the day you went into business to use your expertise to serve your customers. Do you want to divert time and energy trying to keep up with the changing digital landscape or do you want to focus on why you went into business in the first place?

It is easy to get a basic website online today. The question is do you really have time to fine tune your site and keep up with it? Or should you let people that live and breathe websites manage that aspect of your business while you focus on your area of expertise?

Wrap Up

A website is a necessary component of any business in today’s age. If you don’t have one then you are giving up an edge to your competition. If you do have one, you need to make sure it is providing you the edge you need.

Utilizing a website design firm as a partner to your business can pay dividends in potential revenue by letting you focus on your area of expertise while the design firm builds and maintains a competitive Internet presence for you.