Your website is your marketing home base

Your website is your most important marketing asset, your marketing home base. It’s the one place where your ideal customer can experience your message in its purest form, where you have complete control over what they see, and where you can express how you can meet their needs without distraction.

Social media and review site profiles on other big name websites are valuable, too—but your website is the pure core of all your marketing efforts.

First Impressions Matter

Benefits of a Professionally Built Website

Newer website systems have made it easier for anyone to create a DIY website. But will just any website do to promote your business professionally? Not if you are serious about building a profitable business!

We know our business owner clients are smart cookies! But they can’t be expected to become marketing experts overnight. Here’s why a business owner should resist the urge to create their own website:

1. Strategy

A professional web designer will know what research is essential before building a site, to create a winning marketing strategy for what to say and how to say it. You’ll need an answers to questions like these:

• • Who is your audience?
  • What are their wants, needs, and pain points?
  • How can we demonstrate that you are perfectly aligned with what they’re looking for?
  • What can we highlight about your business to set you apart from the competition?

2. Expertise

Professional web developers bring specialized skills that ensure a high-quality, functional site. There are many nuances to every element of your website that a do-it-yourselfer won’t be aware of.

3. Time

DIY websites can be very time-consuming, diverting your focus from the thing a business owner is best at—core business activities that your business depends on.

4. Design Usability

Professionals with usability experience create visually appealing, user-friendly designs that enhance user experience and help convert your site visitor to a customer. Since web design goes well beyond creating pretty graphics, a DIY-er won’t know how to create a user experience that works to their advantage. A background in usability, studying how people’s eyes track across a website and how they consume information online, helps designers construct pages that are easy to use and that convert site visitors into customers.

5. SEO

One of your top priorities will be getting found ahead of your competitors and making your site easy to use. Experts optimize your site for search engines by creating an easy-to-navigate structure for search engines and site visitors, and by optimizing each graphic and each piece of content to match your ultimate goals. Your site should have several levels of optimization that go well beyond filling in the “SEO” fields in a DIY website builder system.

6. Security

A professional will set up your site on a robust hosting system with 99-100% guaranteed uptime, SSL, and security measures to protect your site from threats.

7. Scalability

Developers build sites that are structured with growth in mind, so they can grow with the changes in your industry and change as your own business goals evolve.

8. Decision Making

Ideally you’ll have analytics tracking the performance of your site and someone monitoring them to help guide you to you next best steps. A new site needs a month or two to establish patterns, and after that analytics should reveal where your site is succeeding and where there are opportunities for improvement. Without watching analytics, you won’t know where to focus your marketing energy.

9. Expense

A DIY site might be less expensive to build initially, but in the long run you’ll pay for it with lost performance and lost opportunities to capture business. Ultimately when a DIYer goes to a professional to “fix” their underperforming website, it often takes longer and costs more for a professional to go into every area of your site to correct the defects than it would have to start over with a well-informed strategy, structure, and content.

Opt for professional help to do it right the first time and move on to building your business!