There is no question that having a fantastic online presence is one of the most important elements of building and maintaining a successful business.
It can be tempting to save some money taking the DIY approach- but what will it cost you in the long run? How much time will you take away from your business to manage your website- the updates and security patches, learning to raise your rankings through SEO backlinking campaigns and blogging, grooming and tweaking your site to be the best reflection of your business that it can be?
Further, you can’t afford to have a lackluster website that won’t grow with you- it’ll cost you, customers, either from being turned off by an unprofessional site or because your ranking is so low you can’t be found.
Your website is your online sales force 24/7- it should be making you money while you sleep, not draining your resources.
Work Smart Not Hard
It doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago that building a website from scratch seemed to be strange magic. Only a few people had the odd and wonderful wizarding skills to transform strings of code into interactive web pages. Adding on tools and features was a tremendous feat and one little tiny mistake often rendered a page, or an entire website, useless.
Over time, people learned to master this magic, and utilitarianism slowly gave way to the desire to beautify the pages. Developers began to explore ways to make websites more user friendly, enhancing the user interface, and make it as pleasant as possible to navigate the website environment while tickling the imagination.
A website’s success was no longer dependent on usability alone- the entire structure required elegance to create a positive experience for the user.
You Get What You Pay For
Nowadays, programmers have taken on the task of creating plug and play tools for websites so that every person, not just those that are technically inclined, can easily create a simple website for their business.
GoDaddy, DudaOne, Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace are all fairly straightforward and it’s easy to throw together a website quickly.
Depending on how much money you are willing to spend and the time you can devote to your website to improve it, you can end up with a decent web presence. Downside? You get what you pay for.
A lot of these platforms have BIG limitations; you might not rank well in search engines, you may not own your website, you have little to no technical help, you are on your own for security issues, et cetera.
You may be able to get by with an uncomplicated website today, but what happens as your business grows? Will this website be able to grow with you? Is it SEO friendly for search engines?
How many hours will you have spent learning how to manage your website, making it the way you want it, creating a pleasant atmosphere, keeping up with security patches, and updates when you could have spent all those hours focusing on the thing that makes you go- your business.
Consider these issues, common among cheap personal web builders:
– You’ve built your website using a “free” or inexpensive platform and your business has gotten so big, you are desperately needing some upgrades. Attempting to change the theme, you discover you would have to start all over as all your hard work won’t transition. Then, you decide that another company could do a much better job at managing your online presence so you inquire about moving your website to their care, only to discover that the website was never really yours. They don’t use an open-source platform, and if you stop paying for that website and try to move, you’ve lost everything. You are locked in and the only way to move forward is to start from scratch.
– You’ve discovered the importance of SEO in order to rank on search engines and you want to optimize your site. A lot of these web builders don’t give you the capability to tweak the metadata (title and description- which is ESSENTIAL to show in rankings) for each page. Google can’t see the images you include without filling in alt tags that also help you rank- does your builder give you that option? Duplicate content is very bad for your ranking and some web builders automatically create duplicate content in their system, naturally suppressing your rankings as Google struggles to decide what page to rank. You have a nice looking website you’ve put your heart and time into, but your potential customers can’t find you. This site will ALWAYS be an anchor in trying to rank on the first page for your audience.
– If your website doesn’t load quickly or look good once it comes up, your competitors are one click away: you have to make a great impression from the get-go. Some of these web building platforms have cross-browser compatibility issues; what looks great in Safari may look bad in Chrome. Further, not all websites work in a mobile environment- your desktop version may look great, but if the website is not mobile responsive, you can lose potential customers. If someone is using their mobile device to perform the search, your website’s ranking on searching will be suppressed if your website is not mobile-friendly in Google’s eyes. Let’s face it- everyone is using mobile devices to search these days. Even if your site meets the mobile responsive base requirement, it may look poorly on a phone- will you have the ability to tweak things on the mobile site, or are you stuck with what you have? Does the company you are using offer technical help if you need a developer to tweak items on the mobile interface?
– Not all companies will handle your website security, keeping up on security patches and upgrades. Even if they do, in the event that you are hacked, how much support can you expect from them? Will they alert you to a potential security breach such as thousands of requests coming from your site to backlink to nefarious sites, or will you just find out the hard way long after you can reasonably fix the problem? You may find yourself with a big mess and nowhere to turn for help.
Get The Website You Love & Deserve!
We build our websites in open source platforms so your website is truly YOURS. Our SEO packages are there to support you every step of the way, not only creating the perfect website for your company but a website that is highly visible and sure to bring you the exposure you NEED to grow your business.
We can ensure your website looks fabulous and operates well in mobile environments and current browser versions. We have an expert team to handle all the back end tweaks you could possibly need. If you opt into our website security plan, we will make sure that all upgrades and security patches are up to date, keeping hackers at bay. If you host with us and we see strange activity from your website, we can catch it quickly and correct any issues so you are at less risk of being blacklisted by any hacker’s activity on your domain.
It is tempting to save some money initially, but it’s always important to weigh the long-term costs of going cheap. The time you spend on your website could be devoted to more marketing and sales to bring in more business. Let the professionals do it for you and you’ll pull in more revenue much quicker. Don’t forget that having a professional team managing your online presence, including an SEO campaign, costs much less than hiring a full-time salesperson.
Contact us today to learn more about our top-notch services and brilliant team. We are happy to do our part to keep the magic alive.