As all industries across the board continue to immerse themselves in the digital pool, companies large and small have to keep up to remain competitive. If your business doesn’t have an online presence, it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all.
And setting up a Facebook page or a Google My Business account for your company isn’t enough to make it visible online. Having a good business site is a must if you want to grow your company.
To cut costs (at least seemingly), many small businesses make the mistake to opt to design sites on their own. Just a quarter of SMBs use a web design agency to maintain their sites. But, here are several reasons why hiring a great web designer is a better idea.
Vision
When you are setting up a site, you also need to consider what it will look like two, three years from now. The job of a web designer isn’t just to design sites using their existing knowledge—they also actively keep an eye on future developments.
The greatest web designers are the ones that make a point of staying up to date with innovative technology. To appeal to the social, mobile, local consumer, web functionality is constantly increasing. If you hire a professional web design company, they will make sure your business doesn’t get left behind in the digital world.
If you don’t have a future plan for your site, or if you only have a vague vision of how you would like your site to evolve, a web designer can help you define it and refine it. They will work closely with you to create a unique look for your site.
Experience
Unless you “speak” a few programming languages, are well-acquainted with the latest web standards and possess great software application skills, you will have a hard time trying to build a mobile-friendly site.
If you are thinking of going down that road, ask yourself how big a learning curve lies ahead of you. You could pay to enroll in a web design course and learn the craft yourself. Of course, it may take some trial and error before you get the desired result.
Or you could hire a web designer who has done this many times before and knows exactly what they are doing. And you won’t have to pay them to learn. There are numerous problems one can encounter when designing a website.
A seasoned web designer has dealt with most of them. Moreover, they know how to create custom solutions for problems.
An experienced web designer can also help you with non-design related services, such as website hosting, email configuration, and domain purchase and registration. Even if you have these features already set up, they will make sure that everything works well together.
Resources
It takes a lot of resources to create a great website. Depending on the scope of your project, your business may need SEO consultants, e-commerce specialists, and UX designers. A good web design company has all of these experts in-house or on-call.
You may decide to hire a freelance web designer rather than a whole agency. A good solo designer will work with other experts and make the most of available resources. To ensure their client gets the desired result, a seasoned web designer knows how to combine the vision and ability of different strategists and creatives.
Process
Careful planning is the key to successful web design. Building a site is a complex process. Every professional web designer has an established process they follow. It ensures no detail is overlooked. Usually, it involves the following steps:
- Strategy: Preparation and research are the foundation of good web design.
- Design: Once the preparation work is done, the designer starts creating custom elements and the visual look of the site begins to take shape.
- Build: In this step, the developer builds site functionality and adds content to the site—turning the creative vision of the web designer into reality.
- Test: To make sure your site will work flawlessly on different devices and browsers, first it must undergo extensive beta testing.
- Launch: After the final touches have been made, it’s time to move the site to a live server.
- Report: Tracking the website’s performance is the last step. It’s also a step that never ends. The developer and designer make content updates and required tweaks based on the site’s performance.
Scalability
When it comes to sites, most businesses start small. The average SMB site starts out with a simple contact form and just a few essential pages of content. But, as the business grows, so does its site. Soon, the site owner wants to add an online payment form, a hero image, playful cursors, dynamic scrolling, and other cool elements.
A good web designer will have this in mind from the get-go. With a good web designer by your side, you won’t have to re-develop your site to add enhancements.
Your web designer will also prevent you from taking your website in the wrong direction. It’s not uncommon for site owners to get too excited and start adding overkill elements because they have seen them elsewhere.
A great designer is someone who will tell you not to add an annoying pop-up window or notification rather than take the opportunity to make more money on you.
If some of your ideas don’t work, they’ll explain why that is the case. When you work with a good web designer, you can expect to learn a great deal on color psychology, whitespace balance, and other things related to website aesthetics.
Time
Again, you can learn how to design a site by yourself. But, is this good use of your time? No matter what line of business you are in, your talents are best used on the actual day-to-day running of your company. Time is one of the most precious commodities of an entrepreneur, and a good web designer will help you save yours.
Web designers typically work on a fixed-bid estimate, so you can rest assured that your web designer won’t waste time.
Cost
So, even though you can design a website by yourself for “free,” hiring a web designer to do it for you turns out to be cheaper. While you are watching YouTube tutorials and struggling to install a WordPress theme, your target customers are placing orders on your competitor’s professionally designed site.
A professional web designer won’t just set you up with a functional site, but they will base it on a CMS (content management system) so that you can add content to your website yourself and keep it up to date. And, when you need help with more difficult tasks, they will jump right in.