(Sponsored)
If you are a small business owner and you live in the 21st century, you know your business needs a website.
It’s the FIRST thing customers want to see.
There are a lot of do it yourself options – Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.
They all offer the claim that you can build your own beautiful website cheap and easy.
As a business owner with limited resources, cheap and easy are pretty tempting.
With all these options, why invest your money in a professionally developed website?
Here are 5 reasons why you should.
1. Time
Websites take a LOT of time.
I own a professional web development company, Harquin Technologies know 7 programming languages, been a Software Engineer for over 5 years, and made several successful web applications and web sites.
As a paid professional, it takes ME anywhere from 20 to 40+ hours to complete a site. It will take you much longer.
Trust me.
What things could you be doing with that time for your business and your personal life? Yeah, you could save a few bucks. But often that does not compensate for the amount of time invested to build the site.
With any site that we develop for our clients, they typically invest no more than 5 hours for any project.
- 1-3 hours reviewing the site
- 1-2 hours being interviewed about their business
Hire a professional and save yourself the time and effort of building a site yourself and use it elsewhere.
2. Convenience
REVIEW is ALWAYS easier than CREATION.
When people sit down to make their own websites, they run into a lot of things that suck up a lot more of their time than they thought. They think “I need to add some cool photos to the site. This should be quick.” 5 hours later they are still trying to find a good picture to add.
Or they think “Ok, let’s write the home page copy. I need to get this done quickly so I can handle some other issues.” 6 hours later, they are still looking at a blank screen after trying dozens of different ideas that just didn’t work.
- finding pictures
- following a template
- brainstorming content
- writing content
- constructing pages
- adding code
- placing content
- placing images
- formatting layouts
- solving any issues
- reviewing your website
Even with performing these tasks, your site still won’t look “right”. It still will require a lot of time to perfect it.
You will spend hours trying to make the tiny tweaks that will make your website look good.
With a professional site, you don’t have to develop ANYTHING.
With us, you do two things.
- Tell us about your business
- Review web pages
No writing content.
No time spent entering information into a template.
No coding.
Hire a professional and avoid all the time sucking activities of building a site.
You just watch your site being constructed.
That’s pretty convenient.
3. Quality
Here is an amateur site.
Here is a professional site
You want pro quality.
4. Expertise
There is nothing like watching a master of their craft at work.
Today, I asked my graphic artist to whip up a logo for my sister’s Etsy shop (a favor from big brother). I asked him to do something simple just to help her out.
In 15 minutes, he whipped up something that was PERFECT for her shop. I couldn’t make a logo like that even if you gave me 20 hours, 3 books, and a YouTube tutorial. It was STUNNING!
Experts are experts for a reason. They can do much better work than novices in much less time.
When you are building your own website. There are many skills you need to learn in order to make a great site.
You want to use a great looking picture you found, but you have to spend hours learning photoshop and it still doesn’t come out right.
An expert will already know photoshop and can make that picture sparkle in just a few minutes.
You want to place your carefully written copy in the template, but you have to spend hours trying to tweak it so it looks just right.
An expert can make those tweaks in seconds and do it in a way that makes you say “wow”.
Making a website requires many skills that you really need expertise in:
- Graphic Design
- Art
- User Interface/User Experience
- Sales
- Copy Writing
- Photography
- Photographic editing
- Coding
- Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
Professional designers are experts that hone these skills every day.
Our company has copy writers, graphic artists, and web developers working on our sites.
Our team has been training for YEARS in their area of expertise.
You won’t get that expertise on your own.
Why make your first foray into Graphic Design or Copy Writing on an asset that impacts your business?
Hire an expert.
They’ll build something you could never build by yourself.
5. Growth
Your business will outgrow a do-it-yourself site.
When I was in college, I had a band and we wanted to make a website.
I went online and built a site on some small, “do it yourself” web-building service for bands.
At first it was great. It looked good and served our needs.
But as I began to promote the band in new ways, I started to run into the limitations of the cheap “build your own” website.
When I wanted to add more tracks, change the layout, or change how people used the site – oops, can’t do that!
There was a space limit, code requirements, and no control over the site template.
With many of these do it yourself services, you begin to outgrow the service as you start to tailor the website more to your business needs.
For example, we had a client come to us from Squarespace because she wanted to use a different payment processor on her e-commerce site. Squarespace wouldn’t let her switch her e-commerce site to PayPal so she came to us.
We created a beautiful online shop for her product that allowed PayPal use.
We have another client who hired us to design a website to advertise her Real Estate School. Last year, she asked us to build her an application that could administer and grade her student’s licensure exams as this three-hour task was sucking up hours of her life.
We implemented an online testing solution that cost our client nothing, and gave her back hours of time.
We have had several clients want us to build them a back office to support their distributors and employees.
We easily added that for them.
When our clients need more functionality or support, we go behind the scenes to add applications and features they need for their growing business.
That is next to impossible with a do it yourself service.
Hire a professional so they can make a site that will be able to grow with your business.
Conclusion
Getting your website professionally built is a great benefit to your business.
- It saves time
- It’s easy
- It’s high quality
- It’ll grow to fit your needs
A do-it-yourself website is cheap, but it’s definitely NOT websites for dummies.
It sucks up hours of your time, and ultimately it won’t be as high quality.
Don’t waste your time fooling with templates, picking out pictures, and trying to write copy from scratch.
Pay someone else to worry about that and do what you do best for your business.
You are a business owner and an effective leader. Effective leaders don’t do everything. They get experts to help them bring their visions to life.
Hire an expert to bring your site to life.
It’s an affordable investment that will benefit your business for years.
This post has been sponsored by Harquin Technologies
If you want a beautiful, quality website fast and easy or you want to get out of do-it-yourself hell, I can help. Harquin Technologies is my own web design company and we’d gladly work for you. When we take on a project, we don’t stop working on your site until you are ABSOLUTELY satisfied. We have copy writers, software engineers, and graphic artists on our team. We have helped our customers make sales, gain leads, and increase their productivity. We’ll do the same for you. Save yourself time, headache, stress, and effort.
Contact us today at info@harquintechnologies.com OR call 248.408.3027.
Mention ‘Startup Mindset’ and we’ll give you a 10% discount.
Quintin Evans
Founder and Director Of Business Development
Qevans@harquinTechnologies.com
www.harquinTechnologies.com
