Guest author: Anne Lupton
Do You Really Need a Web Designer?
By Anne Lupton
Many small business people get into their line of business with a very "can do" attitude, very often taking on multiple roles. They do their own ordering, keep their own books, clean their own customer bathrooms (maybe), and handle their own advertising.
This is reasonable... if you're a very small operation and don't mind diversifying your time into tasks that don't really generate revenue for the business. But, there's a point of diminishing returns in trying to juggle everything yourself.
This "can-do" attitude often extends to wanting to build their own web site and hopefully generate leads. And why not? At first glance a web site appears to be a very expensive entity to create. They may have gone out and secured proposals from various designers and come back with a very wide range of quotes.
Then they run across various Internet companies that offer an easy-to-use web design tool so that they can try their hand at designing something and maybe save hiring a professional designer. The sweet siren song of easy web site builders can easily lure in the uninformed, uneducated business person. After all, why should they pay several hundred or thousand dollars for a site that they could crank out for �99?
Looking at a website from the outside, and not seeing any of the backend planning and development, it can seem deceptively simple to create a site. After all surfing on the Net is simple, painless, even enjoyable. How different can website building really be?
Only after months, and maybe years, of sitting on such a home built web site (that never gets found in the search engines) do they recognize that there's maybe something more to building a traffic-generating website than their easy web builder implied.
There usually comes a point when they recognize their time is better spent doing the business of THEIR business and NOT trying to do everything. Essentially, subcontracting out various aspects of the work becomes a very visibly positive return on investment (ROI). The light bulb goes on, so to speak, that hiring a professional designer (that can build them a site that the search engines smile on) is money well spent.
My advice? Sure, give those low cost DIY web builders a shot. In the end you'll have a MUCH greater appreciation for the high degree of skill and immense time that are involved. And then maybe a few hundred or thousand dollars won't seem so bad.
Anne Lupton is a web designer in Appleton, WI, that builds sites with an architecture for SEO right off the bat. If you have a website that's not working (ie. sitting on page 20 of a Google search) or you're looking at building one from scratch then contact her through her company, Sandhill Website Design.
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