Your website design is something that is very personal to you, it is something that you, as a business have very particular ideas about.  Often the most cost effective route may seem to be to produce your website ‘in house’ instead of tasking a specialist agency, such as ours, to do it for you. However there are things you need to consider…

A website is a powerful force, not only for good, but for bad also.  Often your website will be the first contact many customers have with your company, and occasionally it will be the only contact a customer will have with your company.  If your website is poorly designed/built/maintained then, (true or not) in your customers eyes, so too is your business.

Below are six of the top reasons to have your website produced by a professional agency.

1. Initial perception:
Customers often make their own minds up about you from their first contact, and these days that first contact is increasingly on the Internet.  A poorly designed website will reflect poorly on your business.  If your website looks home made, your business will look amateurish to your visitors, a simple professional design can work wonders in providing a credible online ‘first contact’.

2. Individuality:
If you do your web design in house, will you be using a bespoke design? More often than not in house designs in small companies use ‘off the shelf’ packages that cost relatively little (or even worse, that are free).  This may solve your website problem for a low cost, but what can be said for sure is that there will be thousands of other sites out there that look the same as yours.  Aside from the potential to confuse your brand, it shows you are willing to cut corners, so who will blame your customers if they think that about your business too?

3. Colour Consideration:
Web designers work carefully on every aspect of a design, not only the physical placement of information, but how your eye responds to its colour.  Many home made sites, in an attempt to make them ‘stand out’ use bright garish colours – yellows, lime greens and bright blues, which, aside from the amateurish appearance, will actually drive visitors away rather than attract them.  A designer has years of experience in creating a colour palette that both works with and enhances your brand colours to create a pleasing, relaxed atmosphere for your visitors to browse your products/information.

4. Visitor Flow: 
A website should not just be a ‘dump’ of all the information to do with your business, you shouldn’t just have a large amount of information on the front page and expect visitors to read it all.  Designers will consider amongst other things, what information needs to be where, and how to direct a user through that information to ensure that they visit and see all the correct pages.

5. Accessibility:
To ensure a website can be seen by as many people as possible, and also that it is DDA compliant (which is a legal requirement), it should be designed with all possible end-users in mind. The content should be logically laid out making it accessible to screen readers and other such accessibility software, something that we here at Hot Sand have plenty of experience doing.

6. Search Engine Optimization:
Last but not least, SEO must be considered in a successful design.  It is not good enough in this digital age to simply just have a website, search engines like Google must be ‘taught’ to present your site at the top of the list when a customer searches for your product/service/name, and again this requires a certain amount of expertise.  This is about content as much as page ‘tags’ and other digital jargon, the content must be relevant and succinct.

Overall the message is that you are almost always going to get better results through using a professional to create your website.  After all if you wanted to install a new bathroom, would you call in a plumber or try to do it yourself?  It’s not much different when it comes to websites. Yes you could probably do it, but which option would give you the best outcome?