Are you currently in a dilemma between hiring a professional web design agency or using a DIY website builder?
A website is a crucial component of your business and in a previous post we’ve discussed the top 10 benefits of having a website as a small business owner.
Having a website in 2020 has become an absolute must for any small business owner that wants to succeed in today’s ever-evolving competing marketplace.
Look the reality is that building a website that looks good is easy. However, building a website that looks good, converts visitors into customers and creates a lead generation machine for your business is more complex. That’s where your web designer/developer expert comes in.
Let’s face it, when you are just starting your new business and setting it up for success you want to save as much money as possible so every cent counts. That’s where a DIY Web Design option may seem tempting at first as its cheaper than hiring a professional web designer. However, let’s look at this a bit more in detail as in reality you will not be saving that much money by doing it yourself in the medium/long term.
There are two major problems with the DIY Website Builders such as Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy:
- You don’t own the asset
- They are very poor on SEO
We will explore these two concepts further below, but in a nutshell, although at the beginning it may seem that you are saving costs, in the long-run your site will never be found and appear on the search engines hence loosing all the business opportunities to attract and convert new customers.
What is a lead worth for you? Let’s put a standard example of $2000/3000 per lead which tends to be an average for most business owners out there in Australia. If we play it safe and go with the $2000 per lead scenario that your website is attracting to your business on an yearly basis, this is how it would look like:
- 1 lead per month $2000
- 12 leads in an year= $24,000 per year
For each year that your DIY Website is still running you may be loosing a lot of potential closed business generated by a professional, functional, reliable website that attracts the right customer to your website.
With this in mind, let’s continue exploring some other big differences between a professional web design vs a DIY website builder.
Professionalism
First impressions are everything, and that also applies to the online world. You want to make sure that your website stands out from the crowd and look good across any device with a mobile optimised website.
You can give it a crack by leveraging a DIY website builder but that will only take you so far, as they typically end up looking quite homemade and basic.
Another key advantage of having a professional website that is visible and looks awesome is that by hiring a professional web designer, you will rest assure that you will have a website that attracts and captures the right customers online.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
DIY Website Builders are very poor on SEO. Most of them don’t give you the option to perform a proper SEO on your site. We have already covered this topic in another article were we spoke about why your business needs SEO.
Some of the main issues with these DIY platforms is that they don’t allow you to include your meta data, look up your links and perform an analysis, include alt-text in your images amongst other keyword optimisation tasks that are instrumental for your successful On-SEO and Off-SEO strategies.
This is the most important part of the website build as it will determine how many leads your website will generate.
So it doesn’t matter if your DIY website looks amazing and has a very cool design as ultimately it will never be noticed by Google, hence you will be missing out on generating some additional income stream online as discussed above.
Site Management
If you choose to design a site utilising a DIY builder you got to know that you don’t own the asset. You will have to host it on their servers, there is no other place to go!
Therefore, if one day the platform goes down, they stop supporting the website, your website is gone.
With this option you are locked into a system that you have no control whatsoever and over time it could cost you more to manage as much as it would to if you had a professional web design.
Ownership
When eWebsites hands over their custom wordpress website it’s owned by you. You are the owner of the content, data, all the plugins and relevant images. This is a key item to consider as it gives you a lot of flexibility to manage your site as you prefer.
You can definitely choose one of our affordable SEO packages that will ensure you get the most out of your website but you can also decide to manage it by yourself.
On the other hand, with a DIY website builder, you are basically stuck with it. Any extra option to your basic 1/5 page website requires additional money which ends up costing you almost as much as hiring a professional web designer.
You have zero control over your site, NADA. Hence, this is something you should definitely consider before embarking in that journey
Efficiency
At this stage we hope you’ve realised that building a professional, high quality website that converts isn’t as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of work.
Rather than spending valuable time working on a website, you could be focusing on growing your business and attracting more customers.
In the end, at eWebsites we will ensure you get the biggest ROI of your investment so you can focus on attending and serving your clients while we create a high-performance website that generates a flood of quality leads for your business.
