How to Choose a Web Designer
Just over 1 year ago this website wrote a blog about choosing someone to design a website and talking about those website designers claiming to be the best.
We searched around back then during which we came upon a link to a YouTube video from a website agency that claimed to be the best and having the most success in building ecommerce websites. Admittedly the platform used, a combination of Joomla and Virtumart demonstrated it had reasonable capability to act as a flexible solution providing sufficient features to assist with online marketing.
However, we are now 1 year down the line and since then new words came into the world of Internet Marketing – PANDA and PENGUIN.
Now, talk to the average small medium business owner keen to see his company supported by either a brochure or ecommerce website and throw in words such as Panda and Penguin during a consultancy session, and many business owners will think you previously worked in a Zoo, as they have no idea how search engines work, and they are not really bothered. Simply because they put all their faith in the web developer they will engage with thinking that person is a professional and will keep me right and look after me.
Many large companies that operate a website have invested towards putting in place what is referred to as a website manager. This person has to come into your business with a variety of skills in order to handle the day to day managing of a website. And without doubt in today’s online marketing environment you have to dedicate time and effort to your website if it is to win races and bring to your business, traffic, sales and profits.
Many small companies on the other hand do not have the resource or the funding to justify a full time position to someone that will look after their website. Yet, these small business owners have the same expectations and goals as large companies and want to achieve the same goals just like the big brand businesses.
So, why do we have so many businesses who decide to have an online presence fail within the first year of having a website?
The answer to this lays both with the business owner and the website designer or web agency a company MD engages with. More importantly businesses do not take enough time at the beginning of a project to plan out what they actually need the website to do.
Many business owners don’t make sufficient time to put aside in order to learn what type of website is needed by their business and how it should be built.
In the eyes of most company owners and especially in the small business community you will find they turn to someone they know who is ‘Into Computers’ – Yes this person will do them a favour and build them a website.
So, we find when a company comes to us Internet Marketing Practitioners after having had a website for year to tell us it is not working and what can we do for them, we are then told the story of who actually built the website.
In some cases it is a web designer working from home, in other cases it is this ‘person who is into computers’ that probably works as a gas engineer or telephone repairman’ who happens to do his job using a computer and has offered their services as a side line to make some extra money.
As money is tight all around right now, the business owner needing a website thinks – great – I can get a cheap website and be online with it next week.
Our gas engineer or telephone repairman says, “yeh its easy I just go to some website get a template or two and throw this thing together and there is your new website”. The only thing is, it doesn’t work.
If you are reading this and think you are in this type of scenario right now where you are either considering “ I need a website” to support my business, or you are thinking “I have a website and it doesn’t work” and brought very few visitors or sales then get contact us and we can tell you about people this website can signpost you too.
You might want to talk to ICTADVISOR LTD who are eager to support the small business community and ensure business owners don’t waste their valuable budget when deciding on having a website. Or you can make contact with an organisation such as Sitelogic Marketing who support some really large brand names across the World. And, to ensure your website meets with best practice design standards, why not visit the OnlineXcellence website, where you will find the people behind both ICTADVISOR LTD and Sitelogic Marketing along with a few others all willing to help both large and small companies achieve reaching their goals online.