You want to represent your brand in a carefully curated setting and put out the messages you know will attract and hold customers and build loyalty.
If you own a business of any size, you need a website. This isn’t an option, or we’ll get to that later type of scenario. Customers expect a sharp, informative, accessible, interactive website. They want to know all about you, your mission, your beliefs, and even about your employees and your company's culture.
You want to represent your brand in a carefully curated setting and put out the messages you know will attract and hold customers and build loyalty. You want somewhere you can control the messaging and a place to do damage control if a disinformation campaign hits you.
You have two choices, hire a pro or do it yourself. Unless you’re a web designer or have decades of experience designing websites, and now you’re just building wooden boats, you need to hire a pro. There is far too much riding on your website to treat it as an after-school project or allow your nephew Clive, who is really good with all that tech stuff, to handle it. A website, especially if you’re starting up, can make or break your business or tarnish your brand from the get-go.
Hire a pro. Here’s why.
A quality Website Sans the Stress
You’ve been to this website, the images never load, the page itself loads slower than history, and some of the copy is still lorem ipsum, so you think you’re reading Latin. It is a nightmare.
There are a lot of details and moving parts to a professional website, and an amateur designer isn’t going to coordinate all those parts well.
If you decide to do it yourself, you’re dropping a few tons of stress into your life. You probably have a limited skill set in design, so the tools required will force you to stop your life and learn the basics about them. But the basics will make your site look basic.
A professional knows the tools and more. They have experience and understanding of workarounds, little details, and those magical things that give your website that extra pop. You are running a business and building a brand; you don’t have time for all that. Relax, let the stress go, and hire a professional.
You’ll Get a User-Friendly Responsive Design
We've said this already if you only know the basics, your website will be basic. It will not be responsive and probably not very user-friendly either.
Here’s a fact The share of mobile eCommerce sales in total eCommerce sales has increased 39.1 percent from its 52.4 percent market share in 2016 to the current 72.9 percent market share. That means your website needs to be responsive if you want to keep pace with the competition.
A responsive design means your site will adapt, resize, respond and react to your user's devices. Chances are your do-it-yourself website will need to be more responsive and translate well to the number of devices users have today.
If your website is not responsive, it will not compete in today's mobile market.
Up Your SEO Game
This is pretty simple. Search engine optimization will make or break your company. This should not be news if you’ve been running an eCommerce business. The higher you rank on search engines, the more traffic you’ll get. More traffic leads to more conversions. And this means more revenue.
Professional designers understand this, and they know how to make your website more attractive to search engines. They will dramatically increase your status on search engines with loading times, meta descriptions, and several tricks they picked up through experience.
SEO is very technical in nature, and unless you know what you’re doing, it can backfire on you. This is yet another area where a professional makes all the difference.
Conversions Plus
When you’re looking to increase conversions, this is where a professional website designer steps up your game.
Small changes like the colors of buttons, placement of CTAs, and even the imagery you use can keep a customer on your site longer. The longer they remain, the stronger your chance of converting them to a sale.
Every possible customer that strays from the conversion path is potentially a lost sale. A professional designer knows this and makes changes, some small, some very significant, to keep your customers on the conversion path.
Panache and Polish Means Credibility
Making a strong, memorable first impression is vital for an online presence. You’re using your website to build relationships with your customers. When they pull out their mobile phone and start searching, a well-designed site, with polish and extras, a great layout, and easy functionality, puts your best foot forward and makes your site appealing to searchers.
A professionally designed site will scale and work seamlessly on mobile tablets, laptops, or desktops. It will be informative and have fantastic imagery, animation, wonderfully inventive transitions, and more. A professionally designed site stands out for all the right reasons and gives your business credibility and legitimacy.
A poorly designed, do-it-yourself site says, we don’t care.
Time is Money, and Both are Saved
It may feel counterintuitive, but hiring a professional to design your website will save you time and money.
If you have no experience in this area, you’ll need some training to understand the tools. You’ll need time to figure out how to design. And, if you’re doing it yourself, you’ll have to factor in time to deal with mistakes, customers being upset because your pages aren’t loading or the UX is terrible. This will cost you more money, headaches, and loss of customers in the long run.
There are places where it makes sense to cut corners and save some money, but not with your website. There is too much riding on your site to do a slapdash, homemade job.
A non-professional web design is inefficient and will cost you money. This is not an area to cut corners or make do because that will be what your customers see; a company that cuts corners, doesn’t take its customer engagement seriously, so why would they do business with you?
Designing and building a website takes a significant amount of time, and as we all know, time is money. Don’t waste either.
You Have a Business to Run
There is enough to do running your business without taking valuable time away from other details to stop working and learn how to design a website. Hire a professional.
Take a look at what ThoughtLab has done for other companies. Smart, engaging, interactive, responsive websites that convert.
You run your business and let Thougtlab employ theirs over two decades of experience in building you a professional website. We take the stress off of you and give you a polished professional website that you will be excited to share with everyone.
It’s your first impression, your best foot forward; it defines you and your brand. It states that you’re serious, listening and responding to what your customers want. If you’re serious about your business, few things communicate that better than a professionally designed website.
Contact ThoughtLab for a free consultation and up your website game. We are web design masters, do not settle for less; it will reflect poorly on your business.
