Attention Business Owners: Please Hire a Professional When Building Your Website!
Many business owners underestimate the importance of having a well-designed website to represent their brand and their business online. A true professional in the business knows that these free websites and free hosting gimmicks that exist out there on the web give a business owner a mediocre shot at best representing their business online. As a matter of fact, most of these websites do us a favor because they allow our clients to appropriately compete and drown out their clients online! Most of these free websites and free tools online or low-cost tools to build a website just want to do volume business they really don’t help a business owner when it comes to representing the brand and their business online.
Business owners that have built their own website or have hired family members or long lost cousins to build their website ultimately encounter many pitfalls that soon cost them more in time, money and headaches and distract them from operating and running their business. Below are just some of the pitfalls I’ve seen over my career:
1. The site tends to never be completed and this always seems to be the case when a business owner wants to takes a shortcut
2. That friend or family member never seems to have time or wants to help with managing the website
3. Face it the website looks like garbage and it looks like a 3rd grader did it. This is no way to run your business!
4. The person you hired, who will build and design your website runs with your deposit and can never be found again!
5. You think you saved money on the project, but what you really did is lose money by chasing away your prospects from doing business with you. Why would they want to engage you further when your competition is doing a much better job representing their business and brand online?
6. Its nine months later and you still don’t have your site done!
7. Finally, you can’t get around to developing content for the site and you simply don’t have the time and energy to deliver the content to your cousin or friend and therefore your website never gets done or completed!
A Few Last Thoughts!
Let me break it you, if you’re a business owner and you sell products and/or services, it is to your benefit to have the proper representation online so that you can actually be taken seriously in your industry and among your consumer client base. There’s nothing worse than a business owner who is in business represent themselves in an unprofessional manner because they want to save a few hundred bucks here and there. My message, experience and philosophy to business owners are as followed: You either do it right or you don’t do it at all, period, full stop!
The only caveat that I would add is that if you don’t do it, you’re going to be considered the minority because the consumer or your particular customer is already conditioned to research and look for your service online. Everything that everyone will ever do before they make a decision will probably go through some online channel to either verify the credibility of the business that they’re currently going to engage in, look at reviews or figure out whether or not you’re the best person in your area or on the web to do the job. So what’s my message to business owners? In your business planning you absolutely, 100% need to add a website to your marketing expenses!
Now for those who still don’t understand what I am trying to explain and still cant seem to get why its important to hire a professional to design their site, here it is again! Don’t be a cheap skate! Invest in your business and invest in your brand. You’re never going to be taken seriously if you don’t have at least some decent form of presences online. You don’t need to spend $15,000 or even $10,000 on a new website, there are plenty of agencies that can build your website for under $5,000 or even $2,500 but whatever you do make sure you get a professional to design your website and make sure that the branding of your business is represented correctly on the most important billboard in modern-day history: the Internet!
If your business is looking for ideas or needs help in relation to a website contact us directly at lighthouseinternetmedia.com, email us at emilio@lighthouseinternetmedia.com or call us directly at 305-389-8955
To your success,
Emilio Yepez
