8 Killer Benefits | Hire a Professional Website Designer
1. Beat Your Website Competition
Every business must have a professional website to be competitive today. Internet has become the leading resource for people to find information. A professional website designer will make sure your site has a great presentation and is upfront in google rankings.
Your website is the ‘online home’ of your business. You’ll be sorry if you skimp in this vital area. Make it a top priority and you’ll be glad you did. Create an amazing home for business and it will pay off many times over.
Consumers evaluate products and services long before they decide to make a purchase, and if your website isn’t professional, they’ll move on to the next vendor.
Having a professionally designed website will enable your small business to compete more effectively with larger more successful companies.
DIY websites will give your business a huge disadvantage over the competition. Homemade websites often look unprofessional, don’t effectively capture leads, and cause issues down the road.
2. Custom Website Design & Branding
A professional website designer will create a unique website to best suit your business. It will be easy to understand, simple to use, and visually appealing.
The web designer will study your business, service and products, and work with you to create an effective presentation. There are about millions, even billions of web sites on Internet. How are you going to make yours stand out?
A professional website designer will create a website unique to your business with clean navigation, efficient loading, that displays properly in all the major browsers.
3. Save Time & Money
Hiring a professional website designer will allow your new website to be up and running quickly and efficiently which will save your business money. The increase in traffic and sales generated from a professionally designed website will more than offset the cost.
4. Target Your Audience
A professional website designer will help your business communicate your message more effectively, reach your target audience, generate leads and increase sales.
5. Latest Technologies
When using a professional website designer, you can be assured that the site is being created with the latest responsive technologies and best practices for optimal performance and ease of use.
6. SEO | Get Found on Google
If search engines can’t find your site easily, your potential clients will not either. Your site must be optimized by a professional in order to be found efficiently. A professional website designer will use SEO techniques effectively so your website receives great rankings from search engines. One of the most important factors about a professional website is a Search Engine Friendly design.
7. Webmaster Services & Support
In this day and age, a website is never truly finished. Rather they are always a work in progress, and must have continual maintenance to keep them current, relevant, secure and backed up.
Technology is continually changing, and websites need be kept up-to-date with these trends. A professional website designer will build your site in a manner that allows for easy web maintenance and will be able to maintain your site as well.
When your site needs a change in content or appearance, you can either do it yourself, or contact your professional website designer to quickly do it for you.
Many people aren’t aware of the damage a poorly constructed site may cause to their business. It’s not worth the risk of a home-made website when professional website creation is cost-effective and available.
8. Avoid Limitations of DIY Websites
Although DIY site builders and home-made websites are a good place to explore and learn, they are not the best place to develop your small business website. DIY site builders have severe limitations.
DIY site builders have a limited platform. Often it’s not possible to upload needed images, documents, or media files.
Often it’s impossible to move your site to a different platform. So when your business grows you will have to have a completely new website built on a different platform. You also will likely lose any SEO that you may have gained.
DIY Website builders are known to have poor SEO and severe content marketing limitations as well.
How To Hire a Professional Website Designer
Cost of Professional Website Design
Building a website is like building a house. You can build a cabin in the woods for $500 or spend many millions of dollars on a mansion. The same is true for a website.
First, you must establish a realistic budget. I know designers that work on websites that average $50,000, others $5,000, and some $500.
Typically a $50,000 website will be created by a team composed of a designer, a coder and an SEO.
A $5,000 website will most likely be created by one person skilled in web design, coding and SEO.
A $500 website will most likely be home-made, or created by a beginner who knows a little about using a drag and drop site builder, but has no coding or SEO skills, and very little design skills.
I worked as a web developer on a team, building a website that cost about $100,000. We had 5 team members working on that site for many months. It’s a slow process.
The client spends a great deal of time going back and forth with graphic designers and sales staff to eventually come up with a PSD file rendering of the site to be built.
Next, web designers and developers code it. Of course, their are many iterations and changes along the way.
$2,500 – $5,000 Website Cost
To create a site in the $5,000 range, the team get’s reduced to one designer with a multi skill set. The design build process is also simplified. A theme/template is chosen that aligns with the needs of the business as closely as possible and customized where needed.
After a discovery process of learning the needs of the business, I start building a development website and customizing the theme. The client can provide input and changes can be made on the fly as I go.
The basic SEO foundation is laid, google analytics is setup, and often client’s invest in additional monthly SEO work to add optimized content to improve organic search ranking.
How To Choose a Professional Website Designer
Rather than having an agency assign a generic website designer to your project, look for a website designer with a name, portfolio, clients and reviews/references. After culling through a few designer profiles, choose a website designer that works within your budget range.
You can search for your website designer online, or from a referral. You also may have luck with an agency, or a freelance website, local, or even far away in a third world country.
Regardless of how you find your website designer, the same principles apply, and communication is very important. I’ve had clients tell me that working with a developer in India did not work because of the time difference, and poor communication.
Communicate Your Needs Well
Be as specific and detailed as possible about the needs of your business website. Reference other websites when explaining what works and doesn’t work for your business.
Provide as much content as possible for your website. Remember to allow time to size and optimize images so they load and display properly. Keyword rich image titles and alt tags should be added to each image for SEO.
Best Freelance Web Designers for Hire
I believe a good freelance website designer delivers the best web presence for the least amount of money because we’re not carrying the overhead. In addition, it’s very likely that a good freelance website designer is entrepreneurial in nature, and has all the skills necessary for a successful website design and build.
On the contrary, an agency tends to have more specialized team members, and high over-head cost. It’s likely that the agency coder can’t design, the designer can’t code, the SEO, customer relations manager, and sales staff can’t design or code. You’ll need the whole team at the agency, so they’ll need your whole wallet!
So save money, and get a professional web presence ….. hire a freelance website designer.
How To Find a Good Freelance Website Designer for Hire
Do a google search for ‘web design’. I recommend disregarding the paid ads on top. Cull through the listings. Look closely at the listings. Disregard the agency listings. Look for a web designers with a name and check out their websites. If you like their website, check out their reviews, portfolio, and read their blog.
How is their SEO? Does their website look professional and display well for other keywords such as wordpress web design? Do they have a FAQ that you can read on their website?
By the time you have finished the above recommended research you should have found a great freelance website designer for hire and be well on your way.
I hope this info has been helpful to you, and if there is any way I can be of service contact Lovett Web Design.
Working with Mark is amazing. He is an expert at what he does, fast and professional. I will continue to work with Mark on other projects. He is very affordable for the excellent quality product he delivers. I was pleasantly surprised at how good this guy is at designing and developing professional looking websites. Thank you!
