If you often wonder whether it's worth investing your hard-earned cash in hiring a professional website designer or digital marketing agency, let me help you come down off the fence and give you some excellent reasons for doing so.
It's not just about the website design, you know. A great web designer will make all the difference to your bottom line.
"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing". Oscar Wilde
A good freelance web designer is worth their weight in CPC, CPA, CPM, CTA, PPC, KPI and all the rest of the other internet marketing acronyms you can throw at them. If you can't get past the cost per click or acquisition, this is a clear sign you need to hire some web design services.
I'm not making up jargon to try and show you how inferior you are. I'm more into grinding the competition into the dust, and you need the web design knowledge to do that.
You might consider servicing your car yourself, but the cost of the tools required to do the job properly will often be more than paying an expert web designer to do the job for you. Have you seen how much a SEMrush subscription is these days?
An experienced web designer understands the overall objective. While they may not have all the technical skills needed to complete your web design project on their own, working as part of a team has many benefits. That's why a digital marketing agency is so valuable.
You will save time and money in the long run.
Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should. I can take my wedding photographs or service my car by watching a video. But is that the best use of my time? Is building a website the best use of yours?
What starts as a great money-saving idea often dissolves into a gloop that you sorely wish you hadn't started. Do you have all the right website design tools to use? Do you even know what the right tools are?
Many times in the past, I've taken on website development jobs that I subsequently wish I'd passed up on because they took a lot longer than I anticipated. These days if I have a javascript problem, I give it to a javascript expert. If I have a CSS problem, I might take a quick look but getting involved is a colossal waste of my time.
It's better to give it to a CSS expert or web designer who knows what they are doing from the outset.
Use your time to focus on what you are good at rather than something that seems like a good idea at the time. Today's technology environment is constantly changing; new devices, technologies and trends emerge, which means your site needs constant attention from a web designer if you want to keep it relevant (and retain visitors).
If you were doing this yourself, it would be like keeping up with the latest developments in graphic design, mobile technology, and website development while running your own business.
Hardly surprising then that most web designers work on an ongoing retainer basis to ensure there's no downtime or loss of sales due to a poorly performing site. And, of course, website designers have access to the latest website design trends and techniques so you can be sure your site is up-to-date.
By working with a website designer on an ongoing basis, you'll get a well-designed website and future-proofed against any changes in technology.
Why Is Responsive Website Design So Important?
Responsive website design builds websites that automatically adapt to the device's screen size display, so a website design viewed on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer will always look its best.
Responsive web design has become more critical than ever before. With the proliferation of mobile devices, it's now possible for people to access the internet from just about anywhere.
Responsive website design ensures that no matter where someone is accessing your site from, they'll always have a positive experience.
Several key components go into Responsive web design:
-Fluid grids: A fluid grid is a layout that uses percentage-based widths instead of fixed-width units, meaning that the site will always resize itself to fit whatever screen it's being viewed on, whether a desktop computer or a mobile phone.
Flexible images: In responsive website design, you resize images using percentage-based widths, ensuring that the visual elements always stay in proportion to the rest of the site, no matter how large or small the screen is.
Media queries: Media queries are a way of targeting different stylesheet rules to other devices meaning that you can have separate stylesheets for computers, tablets, and phones, and each one will only be loaded when needed.
Responsive website design is a must-have for any site that wants to provide a good experience for all users, no matter what device they're using and this is why it's important to hire an experienced freelance web designer.
The Cost Of Getting It Wrong
It is much harder to fix broken code or rewrite someone else's bungled copy than getting a professional web designer to do it right the first time. Plastic surgeons who ruin the job, builders that don't secure ceilings before putting the lintel in, amateur website designers that resize 2MB files and don't know their .jpg from their .png abound.
Crimes committed in website design are primarily frequent because they are well hidden and only come to light when testing tools measure performance.
You have instant access to the latest online marketing tools.
Today, the internet utilises many new and innovative advertising methods such as ebooks, email newsletters, and social media - not to mention all the different varieties of 'pay-per-click' advertising. It can be pretty confusing trying to work out which types of marketing strategies will help you achieve your aims and how to go about implementing them.
It makes sense to invest in a website designer who knows the latest tools and techniques and can advise you on which ones to use - and when! They will also make sure that your site is fully optimised for search engines, so customers find you more readily (saves money on other forms of promotion).
It ensures that your site makes the right impression from the outset.
The average visitor spends less than ten seconds looking at each web page they visit; if the visitor doesn't like what they see, it's unlikely they will stay. This is why it's so important to invest your time and money in a site that reflects the quality of your business, is visually appealing and makes an immediate impact on potential new customers.
Don't forget that even websites with the most polished content will look unprofessional if you don't optimise the web design for readability - which can be disastrous if you're selling products or services that require detailed explanation!
A professional website designer will ensure this by using clear, simple language and colour schemes with appropriate fonts, images and graphics.
So now that I've laid the groundwork and softened you up to hiring a web designer, here are six awesome things your web developer can do for you.
Develop A Coherent Online Strategy
Competing on price is no way to run an online business. Your profits will dwindle into the ether sphere, and copying everyone else in your market segment will lead to expensive advertising rates.
You need to be different to succeed.
Building a website is just the start of an extended marketing journey that can take you down unexplored paths and well off the beaten track.
The best freelance web designers will build you a great website and show you how to optimise your landing pages for conversions, and find the best search engine marketing channels to suit your business goals.
A great web designer will save you time and money in the long run by helping you avoid the many common website design mistakes that businesses make.
A website designer will help you develop a coherent online strategy.
You wouldn’t open a brick and mortar store without first working out your business goals, understanding your target market and devising a marketing plan. The same goes for your website.
A website designer will take the time to understand your business goals and devise a website strategy that will help you achieve them by designing a bespoke website, developing an eCommerce platform or building a membership area.
Project management
I've written an extensive eCommerce project management guide, so if you want to know what's involved in the web design process and how to launch your website, that would be well worth your time reading.
Many things need to come together to get a website project ready for its launch date, especially when working to tight deadlines. Tracking every item to completion is what a great project manager does. You don't want to launch your website and then find that basic user testing or responsive design was not considered.
A contact form that does not work correctly when your website goes live is not a good look. Make sure your web design is thoroughly user-tested.
Once everything is in place, you can start working on your marketing strategy, including SEO, social media, and email marketing. You'll need to generate traffic to your website to start making sales.
The eCommerce project management guide will help you plan and track every aspect of your website launch, from start to finish. It's an essential read for anyone planning to launch an online store and gives you a complete web development roadmap.
Knowledge Transfer
There are many benefits of working from home, and as I've done it for fifteen years or more, I'm qualified to comment.
You can not beat getting individuals to work together in the same space for improving their skills.
Sometimes you can enhance even the most straightforward tasks with a bit of knowledge transfer.
People who work together in a digital agency on different projects can bounce ideas off each other and improve their skillset far more quickly than working solo from home. Several days a week of office work is so important, not just for a web designer.
As a client, you can put all this combined knowledge to work and make a big difference to the result. You can get some great insights from a website designer that you may not have considered before and they are more likely to be up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies.
Perhaps one of many underrated features of hiring a web designer is that they are likely to have a network of other people they can call on for advice or assistance if needed, which could save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Hiring a website designer is an investment in your business that will pay off many times over.
High-quality productions
Exciting imagery quickly captures your readers' attention and inspires them. The overuse of stock images is the biggest failure in amateur website design, and you know when you see stock images because you've seen them a hundred times before.
Filling the page with appropriate images and text is one half of the design equation, and the other half is knowing how and when to use white space to make it presentable.
Wait! What! You hadn't considered how you use white space in the design? Maybe that's an indication that you shouldn't be doing this job. Stale, overused royalty-free images are prevalent on blogs, and you can always spot them because web designers often overuse them.
Getting custom graphics designed by a professional graphic designer for your landing pages makes them look good and gives you a launchpad for some branding initiatives.
If you use stock images, be prepared to find a competitor doing the same thing. The best web designers all have access to pay for image libraries.
Statistical Analysis
Being able to interpret the mass of data generated by Google Analytics and other statistical software can be a full-time job. For those websites with significant traffic, even minor micro-adjustments can have a big impact on the bottom line.
If you haven't even installed the tracking code on your website, what chance do you have of competing?
Responsive Website Design
How Hard Can It Be?
Doing it yourself always seems a good idea until it doesn't. The technical bar of web design is continually rising, and staying on top of the latest trends is what the best web designers do.
You can't hope to run a small business and drive its marketing yourself without sacrificing so much time that the company dies anyway.
Have I convinced you? If you've read to the end, this might be the perfect time to hire a web designer and contact us.
