Good reasons for getting the pros to build your website

Plenty of businesses have a go at building their own websites, unfortunately more often than not this ends up with something that looks a bit of a mess and doesn’t function particularly well in commercial terms for the business.

You probably wouldn’t try to design and build your own house unless perhaps you were an architect or a builder, would you?

We think it’s the same with websites and while you can use My Smarter Website's great tools and ready-made designs within our free site-build system at no cost, we would still recommend you take up our design and build service (which comes in at a very competitive £399 for a site which could potentially cost you thousands elsewhere).

There are a number of reasons why using professional design and website builders is the best option. Here are the key factors as we see them:

The design

If you want your site to look good and have all the correct elements fitted seamlessly together within an overarching, intuitive navigation, a professional designer can create this for ensure this is what you end up with, rather than a site that doesn't make much sense, visually, functionally or commercially. Additionally, if you want interactive elements, such as custom graphics or flash within your site, it's almost impossible without specialist knowledge to add these in.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is crucial if you're going to get the right potential customers to your site. Getting it wrong it can have a major impact on the business you create via your website. If you don’t configure your site’s meta-data and page names properly (this is the information that is used by search engines to analyse a website and the nature of its content in relation to a user’s search terms), and also link this with the content users can see on the ‘live’ site correctly, search engines will push your site well down search results pages, or users might not be able to find your site at all in search results.

E-commerce

For many businesses, customers paying for goods and services via a website is hugely beneficial; the transaction itself is highly efficient, you don’t have to chase payment and you easily capture the details of the paying customer.

So it’s obviously crucial to get this element of your site right. The customer must be able to pay in a secure environment and the transaction must not go wrong or the user will click off and go elsewhere, or cause you extra work trying to sort the problem out.

Site speed

This can be vital, even as broadband speeds in the home generally become quicker. A professional should build your site so that it loads quickly. Some sites haven’t been built properly and aren’t optimized correctly so may load very slowly, frustrating visitors who will almost definitely click off and go elsewhere.

Site navigation

This plays a key role in the success of your site. It must be clearly laid out and intuitive. Any sub-areas must be easy to find and visitors able get to the page(s) they need to most. You’ll also want them to get to the places in your site you want them to visit the most (eg. transactional areas, contact pages etc). My Smarter Website’s free templates all include good navigation, but to get it right our expert help can make the difference between decent and great navigation.

Content

Many small businesses write poor quality text on their site, perhaps understandably if a well written sentence isn’t one of the key abilities you need to have to run your business (which in most cases it won’t be!). Headlines, sub-headers, page titles and sales text won’t necessarily come naturally to you and can reflect very poorly on a business when people think about getting in touch for the first time. Some design companies will employ copywriters who can do this for you and include it as part of the design and build package. Here are My Smarter Website we offer just such a text and content creation service.

This article was provided by The Smarter Web Company which offers web design and marketing services. For more information visit them at [http://www.smarterwebcompany.co.uk/]