March 7, 2017

By Mike Bernier

We have all seen the ads for easy-build website design services. They claim you can design a website for your business in mere hours, even minutes! They offer simple templates to drag and drop your content, and no coding is needed. Wow! Why would anyone pay for professional web design?

If you want a website to display your holiday photos or blog about your garden, these tools are all you need. On the other hand, if you are wanting to market your business, you need more. Here is why:

1. A professional website can work for your Sales Team.

4 reasons you need a professional web design

Networking groups, cold calls, spreading word of mouth, and following up on leads. You may feel like you are always chasing after “The Sale”. Have you ever thought about what would happen if “The Sale” came to you? This is the purpose of a professional website — it works for you.

By ranking high on search engines using SEO, consumers will be driven towards you when they inevitably turn to Google to help them solve a problem or search for a product. A professionally built website will allow customers to see you presented as a professional and leading-edge business. Your website will be organized to draw potential customers down a path that leads to one thing: contacting you.

Think of a dating app. If you have a dowdy-looking, blurry photo with a poorly typed and vague description of yourself, do you think many romantic prospects will want to contact you? Doubtful. You will be busy spending lots of time trying to contact people for dates. On the flip side, what if your photo was taken by a professional photographer with a styled wardrobe? What if you had professional editors writing a quirky and enticing description of your personality? The date requests will start rolling in!

2. Your time is too valuable to spend on learning website design.

4 reasons you need a professional web design

On the surface, easy-build web design services are just that, easy. But it doesn’t take long to get out of your depth if you want to customize and optimize anything manually. You will need to understand how to optimize in order to offer a competitive and professional website. Learning how to override easy-build service templates can be more challenging than building from scratch.

When you start learning web development, you’re going to spend a lot of time struggling over customization of your site using code. You may find yourself Googling things like, ‘get rid of white space at top of page css’ or ‘blogroll not populating’ or ‘Google maps plugin API error’. It takes many, many hours to become competent at building websites. The question is, where do you want to allocate your time? Wouldn’t you be better off spending those hours growing your business?

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3. You need to invest in marketing to grow your business.

4 reasons you need a professional web design

Jeremy at the front desk is a superstar. His sense of hospitality and dedication to putting the customer first is top notch. Clients are always telling you how helpful he is, and sometimes they pop in just to say hello to him.

You interviewed two candidates for the job, Jeremy and Darryl. Jeremy asked for a bit of a higher salary than you were planning to pay. Darryl was happy with minimum wage, but didn’t have any particular experience. Due to Jeremy’s charisma and experience, you chose him — and boy, did that pay off. He is now an incredible face of your business, and has measurably generated sales and increased customer loyalty since he joined the team.

Make your website a Jeremy, not a Darryl. Your website is your front desk on the internet. Invest in a quality the same way you do with your staff, your equipment, and your work space. If you pay the lowest rate for the lowest quality option, you will get lower quality results (sorry Darryl!).

4. You don’t know what you don’t know about website design.

4 reasons you need a professional web design

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
-Shakespeare

You’ve read this article and you’ve decided that you are still going to choose easy-build website design for your site. You think, “I’m pretty resourceful, I took Communications Technology in high school (ahem, in 2002). I know what HTML stands for. I can do this myself.”

Do you know what a long-tail keyword is and where to use it?
Do you know how to 301 redirect broken URLs on your site?
Do you know how to troubleshoot if your site crashes, or how to prevent it from being hacked?
Do you know how to analyze it for ways to implement best practice SEO?

If you answered ‘No’ to any of the above, then you don’t know as much as you think you know.

You wouldn’t install the plumbing in your business location all by yourself, so why build a website yourself? There is more working under the surface than meets the eye.

We can help you build a professional website that will work for your business.

Mike is a Web Developer at Intrigue. You’ll find him managing web projects, building WordPress sites, developing eCommerce Platforms, and implementing CRO and SEO on client sites. Mike enjoys spending his free time being way too competitive at old school video games, playing beer league hockey, and taking long walks on the beach.

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