Whether you’re an established business or a new startup a well designed website is a key to your success in today’s world. But, you look at the cost and quite frankly the price that you will pay for a quality web designer can appear quite daunting with average costs from 1500.00 to 100,000.00 based on your needs and complexity of your site. You figure I can do it myself cheaply and avoid the cost but in the end this method may cost you more in lost business and wasted time than having hired the professional would have cost upfront.
How can this be you say, I bought the software for 29.99 and I did it myself so it cost nothing, how will I lose money? Let’s take a look at it for a moment and go through the numbers and show how a professional developer can save that lost revenue and time.
First lets look at the initial lost revenue. You are an expert in your business and running it. Say you make an estimated 100.00 an hour from your business. I’d think maybe 25 hours using the boxed software to create your site along with another 15 to research and figure out how to get it onto your hosted site. This includes verifying the domain is available, looking for a hosting provider and then uploading your site. During this time your expertise is diverted from your business so you lose some of that 100.00 and hour.
But wait what about registering with the main web search engines, yes you need to register with these engines to get onto their radar. This will mean another 20 hours lost into the process and more time away from doing what you are really best at.
Now you have a site and the money will start flowing but it isn’t and worse yet because you don’t understand how to monitor customer access to your site using tools like Google provides, you have no idea where things have gone wrong or how to fix them.
Poorly laid out web sites that have not been build with search engine optimization can cost you upwards of 35% business because customers either can’t find you or are turned off by the look and feel of the site. This 35% would have paid for the use of a professional in the first year alone.
Your site is out and it works great except in Chrome. For some reason the contact form that is critical to your business isn’t working, how do you fix it. Browsers, although looking like they work the same, each has distinct differences when handling HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These may be subtle or very glaring. Professional developers are used to these things and will design your site to work with these issues. More lost revenue because your customers using Chrome can’t get in touch with you.
These are just a few of the things you can avoid and hit the ground running with a website designed by a professional for what appears to be a daunting cost but actually turns into a solid investment that can extend your business for many years to come.
