The Best Approach to Building a Website:
Hiring a Professional Web Designer or Creating a DIY Website
The Best Approach to Building a Website:
Hiring a Professional Web Designer or Creating a DIY Website
Often time when starting out on your entrepreneurial journey you want to save as much money as possible, so you take to doing many things on your own. Through the process, you find that somethings you’re just naturally good at, even though they’re outside of your typical wheelhouse, and other times you find that you’re just absolutely terrible at them. Let’s face it. You’re an expert in your field, and if your field isn’t marketing, web design, or user experience, then you’re probably not going to be great at those things, especially when it comes to the more technical side like building a website. Sure, you could create a DIY (Do It Yourself) website – but when you use platforms like GoDaddy, Weebly, Wix and Squarespace, you don’t really own your website. And also, to be quite frank, it probably took you five times as long to create something that’s subpar to what a professional web designer could have done, in turn wasting both time and money.
Using a professional web designer has its perks. These individuals have a deeper understanding of user experience, which allows them to extract the right information from your brand or company to include on the website, providing the user with the most complete experience. A professional knows not only how to design a website, but how also to generate sales from it.
To give you an idea of a few of the things that professional web designers, like those at CAST Design Team, take into consideration when building a website, we’ve included a list of terms below. Knowing these terms will help you understand the importance of hiring a professional and communicate better with your web designer once you hire them.
Terms to Know
CTA
The CTA or Call to Action is a clear encouragement to the audience to take action. One of the best and most common examples is the “click here” button. We often see this button or hyperlink shrewdly placed on several sites. Some CTAs are more effective than others, like: learn more, sign-up, book now, download. CTAs are very effective, especially when you use “Power Words” which are words that will get the attention of your audience. The best web designers know which power words to use where. The user flow from one page to another is important to get users down your sales funnel. CTAs can greatly help with this.
Why should you have CTAs?
- Clear Direction to Help the Audience Avoid Confusion and Make it Easier for Them to Navigate Your Website
- Direct Your Audience to Important Information that YOU want them to see
- Direct your Audience to Your Products and Boost Sales
SEO
Have you heard of SEO but not sure what it means? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the technique used to increase your organic (non-paid) ranking on search engines such as Google. That all still sounds a little vague and confusing. Well, to be honest, it will. SEO isn’t a simple task to complete and it doesn’t return results over night. While some people think SEO means adding a bunch of keywords to your website copy, it is much more than that. There are backend technical areas to address and a systematic way to include keywords into the front-end website copy.
User Experience
We’ve mentioned User Experience a few times in this blog already. So now it’s time to dive into what it really means. User experience is about how a user feels when they’re actively searching your site and how they feel once they’ve left. User experience takes into consideration the values and needs of a customer. Bad user experience such as an unclear navigation bar or broken links can cause a user to exit the site sooner than intended. A good user experience can foster sales and leave customers happy and stress-free when leaving your site, in terms causing them to tell their friends about your company. Many things go into user experience such as technical navigation, usability, functionality, and how the overall design of the site incorporates the brand.
When you started reading this blog you were probably pretty certain that you could build a great DIY website, which Hey, you may be able to! But chances are, your business would greatly benefit from a website built by a professional. So, are you ready to hire a web designer? We encourage you to take a look at the services we provide. We’re here to make this process as seamless and stress-free as possible. Let us know how we can help. We look forward to helping you communicate your vision through design!
