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Considering building your business website yourself on the cheap?

I have some bad news…

Do-it-yourself websites look amateurish, tacky, and unprofessional.

Your customers will directly associate your brand with those ugly worlds.

Maybe in the past, if you knew a little HTML or the basics of FrontPage. You could throw a quick website together. No one really saw it, anyway. And everyone else’s sites were just as bad, right? Not anymore.

Web design and programming have been taken over by dedicated professionals.

The web has come a very long way and is now fully mainstream. This means you can no longer get by with having a D.I.Y. business website. That is only slightly less awful than your competitors’.

In 2014, your website must NOT be your backup, afterthought. “Plan B” marketing throwaway piece that it was in the 90s.  It is now the primary, first-line of contact for a majority of users.

Your website should be taken seriously.

You need a website that is worthy of the rest of your marketing efforts. A website you can be proud of, and a website that promotes your business, not embarrasses it.

“Ok, I’ll just pass it on to the I.T. department. They know computers.”

“Computers” is an extremely broad topic.

Assuming that your I.T. team is skilled with graphic design and computer programming. The same as saying your dentist is a doctor. Therefore, he should be able to perform open-heart surgery, too. They are vastly different disciplines. Quite simply, building a modern web application requires special skills and expertise.

It takes years and thousands of hours of practice to become a skilled computer programmer or graphic designer. And that’s not even considering the endless learning required. As technology continues to advance and evolve, forever and ever. The price you’ll pay to rent the experience that a professional has under their belt is a bargain.

“But Joe Freelancer said he could do it for half that much!”

The quality of website-building freelancers can vary wildly.

Assuming you have lucked out and found a competent designer and developer (note the “and” there). You still probably will not have the 1] reliability, and 2] expertise of a dedicated marketing agency.

It’s possible that you may not be able to contact your freelancer during regular 9-to-5 business hours. They may lose interest in freelancing and stop responding in the future. It might take too long to finish your website. It’s also possible that it might not ever get finished.

Are you willing to take those risks? To save a little bit of money on your website in the short term.

If your website is executed properly along with an effective online marketing campaign. It can pay for itself many times over. As a full-service marketing agency, we know how to make that happen.

If you want to be taken seriously you need to take your website seriously.

Contact us for free website analysis and action plan.

Image Credit: Unsplash