Your website is a window to a whole world of prospects, all over the globe. Regardless of whether you’re an online retailer looking to sell products directly through your website, or a bricks and mortar business using your website simply to attract customers and showcase what you do, the quality of your website is of paramount importance.
With the plethora of low cost, DIY website creation platforms available, you might be asking yourself – what is the benefit of having a website built professionally by an agency like Erud IT Marketing?
Here we discuss four reasons why professional website design is a much better option for you.
1) Your time is best spent on your business
While DIY platforms are created to make your life as a webmaster as easy as possible, if you’re expecting to be able to jump straight in without learning the platform, think again. Building your own website, even with the most simple DIY website builder on the planet, takes time. You’ll be required to create pages, write meta titles and descriptions, upload images, write image tags, create links and much more. Ask yourself, is your time best spent messing around with the website or actually focusing on your business?
2) Your website will lack originality
If you choose to use a DIY platform, you will have access to the same templates, graphic designs or themes as every other user. And while you might be able to change colours or upload your logo – which you’ll need pre-designed and in the right format – there will be little to differentiate your website from the masses.
3) Websites created by DIY platforms are rarely Google friendly
A website is useless without visitors, so it’s going to be imperative for you that you’re able to rank on Google. Most templated websites created by DIY platforms are not optimised for search results. While the website might look OK on the surface, the programming and code can be clunky and the site can have extensive loading times, which is almost certain to destroy your rankings. In some cases, DIY websites aren’t even mobile friendly, in an era when the vast majority of website visitors will visit your website on their phone!
4) You will not really own the website
The vast majority of DIY platforms only let you create ‘your’ website on their web host. This has a multitude of risks. Firstly, if you’re struggling with search engine optimisation (SEO) due to the host being in a country or area different from your target market, you will not have the option to move your files to a host of your choice. Secondly, if the DIY website company goes out of business, so will its hosting and you’ll lose everything.
To summarise, if you’re running a professional business, you need a website design created by professionals. It might sound cliche, but when it comes to the web, you really do get what you pay for.