We’ve lost count the amount of times the following statement has been uttered, or variations thereof, when the question of whether a business requires a new website: “no it’s ok, my best friends neighbour can do websites and is sorting us one out“. This is usually followed by a call some months later to the effect of: “err that website we had built is awful, cant be found on Google and we cant update it . . . can you help?”!
This is an all too prevalent issue and it’s understandable, particularly in today’s economic climate that ‘the bargain’ is searched for when looking to employ any service. However, there are so many pitfalls with website design and development that by and large this can really be false economy. The range of skills required to design, develop, host and maintain a website can be wide and varied and it’s almost impossible to find someone with no industry experience who has learnt to make a web page using Microsoft Front Page during an ICT course at school but would have nowhere near the depth of understanding and technical ability to produce a website that will serve the purpose for which it was built.
First impressions are vital to any online business whether new or old, a badly designed business website can quite easily be misinterpreted by customers as a badly organised, stuck in time company, …..which lets be honest, isn’t good for winning new customers is it?.
Nowadays it’s not a matter of just ‘having’ a website online because everyone else has one but a matter of having a website that provides potential customers their first critical impression about your business, translates the right message about your company, be modern, functional, eye-catching, contains logical/transparent navigation, is written with well optimised/keyword-rich textual content, has all the correct coding practices in place, conforms to website coding convention guidelines, conforms to accessibility guidelines etc, etc, etc. In fact, there are dozens of principles that need to be applied to produce a good website that again someone who doesn’t work as a professional in the business wouldn’t know.
Furthermore, there is a vast difference between graphic design and web development for example an amateur ‘Jack of all trades’ is not going to be proficient in all areas sufficiently leading you to a website that is deficient in key areas.
Obviously, nearperfect are a website design, graphic design, website development and search engine optimisation (SEO) company and so would be pro the professional approach but from experience with our client base, some of whom had previously gone down the ‘friend’s neighbour ’ approach, we can say hand on heart that it’s tantamount to throwing good money away in most instances!
