Think of your website for your company as your clothes for you; but not only your clothes, but your hair, your facial expressions, and your personality.
Having a good site is essential in so many ways. How many times have you gone onto a site, not been able to find what you're looking for, so left and lost interest? Your website is the face of your brand. Not only do you want it to be aesthetically pleasing and engaging, it has to be easy to use, accessible, and tick all those user intent boxes.
When designing and creating your site on a budget in-house, it's easy to grab a free template, and populate it with your info, which for small businesses or start-ups, is completely fair enough. However there's huge benefits to investing into a web designer or agency to create it for you:
1. Functionality
You are much more likely to acquire a website that is fully functioning, responsive and optimised if you go through a professional web designer or agency. We use a Brighton based creative web agency called Neptik who ensure our site is responsive (works on all devices), user friendly, sleek and beautiful.
Neptik's site - easy to navigate, clear, and engaging
2. Flexibility
Going through an agency means you can get your ideas out on the table, and commonly always taken into account. Having lavish ideas for your site such as interactive features, media rich pages or eCommerce features, based on your budget, can actually be brought to fruition if you get it done professionally.
3. Ease
For many of us, we're constantly juggling many aspects of the business, to the accounts, to the marketing and sales and so finding the time to sit down and perfect your website can be a difficult one. Using an agency means you can be involved throughout the process without having to take important time out to deal with the nitty gritty details.
4. Professionalism
Most of the time, you can really notice when a company have used a template for their website. It's commonly generic, basic, and unexciting. Although some of these templates can be great for a temporary or minimal sites, I really want to stress the long term benefits of investing into a good web design professional. Your site can really have a chance to stand out from the rest, show your competitors what you're made of, and create a really great platform for your customers to research and use you. The professional aspect will be clear, and it looks good on your half to show that your site is important.
I hope this has given you a few pointers to get you started on your website design journey, whether you decide to opt for a professional service or not! If you're struggling for ideas, sites like this and this one provide some beautiful web/logo and branding inspiration for you to give to your web designer.
