If you needed to have your home’s foundation repaired, would you hire your 15 year old nephew who likes to play with tools to do it? Would you try to do it yourself? Furthermore, would you pay someone to make your new foundation from a pre-made template, disregarding the shape of your house? For the modern business owner, a website is just as important to commerce as the foundation is to a house – but many take these misguided approaches to securing their web presence.
Why Your Nephew Shouldn’t Build It
Future Web Designer?
Sure, there are many of you out there who are saying “My nephew/niece/son/daughter/etc. knows more about this web stuff than I ever will! What’s the harm?” It’s true. Today’s younger generation was born into a world built by the internet. They understand it on a level most people over the age of 40 can only aspire to – the same way the previous generations understood television and CD players. They are what my wife (who is a schoolteacher) likes to call “digital natives.”
An understanding of modern web technology is undoubtedly one of the most important things to consider when choosing someone to build your website, but here is something else to consider. What does your (insert family member here) do on an average day? School? Another job? Hanging out with friends? That’s great! Exactly as it should be. A professional web designer, on the other hand, spends at least eight hours a day (often in addition to obtaining a college degree) staying abreast of the most current web technologies and trends, trying new and different solutions, and generally getting better at their craft. Sounds like someone you’d like to have on your side, doesn’t it?
Why You Shouldn’t Build It
Don't Be Like Him.
You have enough on your plate. You could be a business owner, a department manager, or hold any number of other demanding positions. A simple website can take 40 hours or more to build, and that time can increase exponentially when the person building it is untrained. Can you afford to take that kind of time away from your business? Time is money, after all.
Even when dealing with so-called simple site builders the process can be a bit confusing, and the core code used by many site builders offered by some of the most popular providers is, at best, not optimal for getting your site noticed and highly ranked by search engines. The frustration, time, and distraction are usually not worth it.
In a situation like this, your web designer is like your lawyer: always a phone call away, and able to solve the problem. No muss, no fuss.
Why Pre-Made Templates Are A Bad Idea
Wouldn't you rather be the yellow ball?
There is a massive trap out there. I touched on it briefly in the previous section, but now it is time to examine the “simple site builder” more closely. It sounds like a great idea: quick, easy, visually appealing. At least that’s what they’d like you to think.
Its not quick. You can spend hours – almost as many as a skilled web designer will spend designing a site that is everything you want from scratch – putting together a website with the tools provided by these services. Not to mention, if your website has a large number of pages, the time spent creating them all can quickly spin out of control.
Its not easy. At least not as easy as they say it is. I once had a client that used a particular “drag and drop” site builder for his company website. He wanted to have one page for each product his company offered, but didn’t want an eCommerce solution. His biggest complaint was that every time he wanted to add a new product he had to manually create a new page and resize it, moving all the graphics around to fit in the new page size, based on the length of the content on each page. He spent hours not only working on this task, but learning how to do it. In the end, he asked me to redo the whole thing.
Its not visually appealing. Most site builder services allow you to choose from a group of pre-made templates. These templates are not customized in any way to fit the desired look and feel for your business. They are what they are, and without a good amount of training, there is little you can do to change that. Therefore, you are left with a generic website that looks exactly like a million others.
The Solution
The solution to all of these problems is to find a professional. You want to find a designer you will click with both personally and professionally, someone you could create a longstanding business relationship with, much like you would with a lawyer or doctor. This can ensure that you find someone that not only cares about your web presence, but has the time and skill to take it to the next level.
If you would like to talk to me about your website project, click here to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.
