June 10, 2017
With so many self-build website platforms on the market, it’s common for businesses to undertake the job of building their website themselves.
This is particularly the case with startups and solo entrepreneurs who decide to take matters into their own hands when it comes to their web presence.
For some, this works, but for many it results in something which is, clearly, homemade and incapable of drawing in the right audience.
With that in mind, we thought we’d list five reasons you absolutely shouldn’t design your own website if you’re running a serious business.
You have mere seconds to make a good first impression online, and for most people, it’s the design that plays the biggest role during that initial visit.
In fact, research shows that 94% of a website user’s first impression is design-related. If it looks hacked-together or nondescript (i.e. you’ve simply used the same template as nine-hundred other sites in your niche) they’ll quickly reach for that ‘back’ button.
With cybercrime an ever present threat on our minds and the growing importance placed on keeping personal data safe, trust plays a huge role when it comes to the relationship between website and visitor.
Websites that are poorly designed are less likely to be trusted by those that visit them. If it doesn’t appear as though enough love and attention has been put into a web page, why should anyone risk their data by entering personal details into contact forms?
What’s more, poor web design often results in vital trust signals (i.e. industry body logos, company registration number and the like) being missed off entirely.
Any web designer worth their salt will extol the benefits of keeping things simple with web design, but there’s a big difference between intentionally simple web design and that which has been thrown together.
It’s believed that 59% of consumers would prefer to engage with content that’s beautiful than content which is overtly simple in design. That means the design of your website directly impacts the likelihood of someone placing an order with your company.
There’s beauty in simplicity - if you’re a trained designer who knows how to make a webpage sing.
We’ve all experienced the rising frustration levels that are invoked by websites which take forever to load. Large images, poor code and off-the-shelf themes that are badly designed are the kind of things from which self-build websites suffer, and will significantly increase page load times.
As we’ve already noted, you have seconds to impress your website’s visitors, and they won’t wait for long if your DIY effort loads at a snail’s pace. Why should they?
Sure, you picked a template that had a ‘responsive’ label plastered across it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will take the mobile-readiness of your website to heart.
All self-build platforms will offer some degree of responsive design, enabling the websites you build with them to scale down to smaller screen sizes. Unfortunately, they’ll do so in a fairly linear, robotic fashion and give you little control over how the pages scale down.
With a professional, bespoke web design, you’ll benefit from the knowledge and skill of someone who can ensure your website looks perfect on every screen. And this is vitally important, because studies show that mobile webpages which are one second faster enjoy an increase in conversions of up to 27%.
Still fancy designing you business website personally? Unless you’re an experience web developer, we recommend getting in touch with the experts to ensure your web presence is the envy of the competition.
Statistics courtesy of Business2Community