We all know that there are now plenty of tools out there that can allow anybody to design a presentable looking website for their business, even if they don’t have any coding or design skills. This is a good thing because it can allow small businesses to avoid the expense of getting a professional site when they are first starting out and because it means that in general, users looking for information on the web no longer have to deal with clunky static pages that look like they belong in the ’90s!
However, as good as it is that things like WordPress or Wix allow anybody to make a public-facing website and add some interactive features, it does not mean that there is no longer any value in hiring a professional web design company to create your business site. Here we look at some of the reasons why pro web design can still give a company a competitive edge:
Unique Brand Identity
While you may be able to customize a WordPress theme or another pre-made website template with your own color scheme, font choices, and images, this is not quite as effective as having something built from scratch with your branding in mind. A business’ brand identity is more than just colors and logos after all – it can inform the entire user experience. If you want a website that is instantly recognizable as being a part of your brand, then it is best to discuss these ideas with a professional designer who can make this work. If you haven’t actually decided on your brand elements yet, then working with a web designer can help you to do this, as you can also use their input for things like your palette choices, which you can carry over on to other things you want to brand, for example, printed materials, your social media pages, and offline presence.
Let An Expert Worry About Functionality
Creating simple things such as blogs may be easy enough using tools you can find online or get from your web hosting company, but when you want to add functionality to your site beyond just displaying text and pictures, then it can be a real headache to find the plug-ins you want, get them working how you want them to, and test that they are doing what they should when your site is live. Mistakes with plug-ins can cause anything from being annoying to users, for instance, preventing them from easily doing things they want to do like sharing content using social media buttons, through to more serious problems like meaning that your site fails to comply with certain overseas regulations (such as GDPR in Europe) that are important for internationally available sites.
When you hire a professional company such as PWD in Perth who can give you a free strategy session, you know that all of the features you require on your site will have been developed or implemented by experts, and so you mitigate risks of poorly working features.
Excellence in Everything
If you run the business, you probably understand that the best use of your time is focusing on that. Creating your own website may save money upfront, but this is a false economy if it is taking you a lot of time – time that you would be using better by focusing on your main role as CEO. By having people who are specialists in design doing your website, you are making better use of your resources and also showing that you want your business to feature excellence in everything, rather than having overstretched people wearing too many hats.
Testing and User Experience
When people design their own websites without being familiar with web design principles, they often fail to consider certain things that are actually very important, such as website accessibility. They may also either not think to test a site they have built on devices other than their own computer to check things like responsive pages, or not know how to do this. A professional web design company will be well versed on all of the things that need to be tested on a website, and will also know about web accessibility requirements and regulations – for instance, knowing how to make sure a site can be used with a screen reader for blind or partially sighted people, and which color combinations to avoid so that color blind people won’t have trouble using the site.
As you can see, there can be more to making a really effective website than just choosing a theme and customizing the basic elements, and because of this, there is definitely a value in considering professional web design for your business website, online store or blog, if this is something your budget can account for.
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