Pay a professional to design your company website. I want to make that very clear, right from the start. This is not a post about how you should save your money and do it yourself and “allow me to explain how easy it is”. Nope! Instead I would like to stress the importance of spending a good amount of money on it. Leave it to the professionals.
Your business is worth more than a million bucks.
Photo by Kevin Bhagat
That’s right! Don’t believe it? Well, start believing it, because that’s what it takes to achieve it. You have to believe in your business in order to succeed and push it to greater heights and you have to make others believe it too. In this day and age we have a secret weapon, websites! You need to use it to your advantage. People base their decisions on their experience when browsing through your website.
When my wife and I got married in 2010, we naturally spent a whole lot of money on the wedding, as tradition goes. While planning the wedding I recall saying to her: “I feel sorry for all the small businesses out there that don’t have websites”, because they did not feature on our list of vendors to visit for more information. This is - or at least should be - common knowledge, but what should be even more alarming is how some of the businesses didn’t make our short-list because of the unpleasant experience we had browsing through their sites! It’s actually pretty crazy, some of these businesses might have been really great, but having an outdated, poorly maintained website would just make it seem like they don’t offer the quality that we’re after and there just isn’t enough time to take a gamble on it.
Photo by Edho Pratama
It’s so important to know that about today’s consumer. Time is our most valuable commodity. Who can honestly set a whole day aside to drive around town, stopping at each business that might offer what you’re looking for and later returning to the stores you decide to make a purchase at? It doesn’t work that way anymore. Perhaps in small towns, yes, but if you live in a big city like I do, you’d need to put an entire weekend aside for this and you are going to waste a lot of fuel driving around.
We do our research online and then we shop
Photo by Arnel Hasanovic
You have to pull your customers in through this digital media the same way a shop front design pulls you in when you walk past it in the mall. Your website needs to be pleasant on the eye, informative and very user-friendly. It should make people want to return to it and say; “this is the business I want to go visit”. Sure there are great “do-it-yourself” solutions out there, now more than ever, but there is so much to this art that you will not know unless you’ve spent at least 3 years studying and practicing it full time. That is why I urge you to fork out the big bucks when it comes to your website. It will pay off, believe me. If you simply don’t have the kind of money required to do so then start saving now. In business, there is nothing as satisfying as a prospective client walking through your door excited and practically already sold on your services because they fell in love with your website!
So how much money should I spend?
Photo by Vladimir Solomyani
I will attempt to answer this question, but, to reach an accurate cost does actually require a proper evaluation of your exact requirements. So, feel free to ask me in the comments, I’d be happy to assist.
A basic 10 page website should not cost you less than $1’400. To my fellow South African Steemians I’d say you should spend about R10’000 or more. Seems like a lot of money doesn’t it? Think about it this way, a plumber will cost you about $70 per hour (in South Africa perhaps R400 per hour). $1’000 would get you 20 hours of a plumber’s time (25 hours in SA). Now think about how long it took you the last time you tried to design something as simple as a birthday invitation, 2 to 3 hours? That doesn’t really leave the web designer with much time to complete your 10 page website, does it? Sure, they might work faster, but they’re also inclined to be more of a perfectionist. That is if you choose the right one, so be sure to study those portfolios beforehand.
Thanks for reading and I hope this has been an informative post for you. As I said, please leave me comments with any questions you might have, I’d be happy to help where I can.