If you’re visiting my site, chances are you’re interested in hiring a professional to design and develop your website. A question I’ve been getting recently when I tell people I’m a web designer is, “hasn’t business been rough? It’s so easy to build a website these days!” It’s true. Squarespace, WIX, WordPress and Shopify have made it incredibly easy to get up a website in a matter of minutes.
I trim my own hair. It’s pretty easy for me to handle cutting off split ends on my own. However, if I want to go for a whole different type of cut, you’d better believe I’m going to a professional.
If you own a restaurant and you just want a place to put your address, phone number and menu, sure, a DIY website can be just fine. However, if you want to take it up a notch, you should definitely look for professional help.
- Professionals know what works. A good designer won’t just blindly go along with your ideas, they’ll offer guidance along the way. You might add 100 uncompressed photos to one page, but your web designer will definitely advise against that. You’ll have someone to bounce ideas off of and get feedback on your ideas.
- A web designer will speed up the learning process. I’m a self-taught WordPress professional, and trust me when I say it took me a LONG time to get here. Even the basics took me a long time because I was doing what a lot of you probably do when you’re learning how to manage a site with WordPress: looking up tutorials, getting confused by something in a tutorial and looking for a tutorial on that thing, getting exhausted and giving up for a few hours before coming back to it. When I build a website for a client I offer free training, either via Skype, phone or screencasts. While you might spend more money to get your site up and running, you’ll definitely make up for it with all the time you’ll be saving trying to learn how to use WordPress. And speaking of time…
- Your site will go up faster. Rather than guessing and checking and trying to do what you want and not getting it quite right, you’ll be able to get your site up and running much faster, meaning business can start faster.
- You’ll set yourself up for long-term success. While WordPress is very easy to use, inexperienced users can often make mistakes that can cost them in the long run. For example, an issue I’ve run into quite often is when a client with a bit of coding knowledge modifies a WordPress theme. The issue with directly modifying a WordPress theme is if you update it, you’ll lose all your modifications. Not updating it leaves you open to a ton of security issues. Not good! Your web developer should make your site future-proof. Even if aesthetically it might be “outdated” in 10 years, it shouldn’t break or get buggy if you try to update it.
- You’ll have a new member of your team. Your web designer should be your go-to person if you have website technical problems. I still talk to clients I worked with at the very beginning of my freelancing journey when they have questions or issues. Having a person you can turn to when you need help fast is absolutely invaluable.