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I get this question a lot, incidentally, normally delivered in a cocky tone. And typically, I don’t take these people on as clients at the web design agency.
Yes, there are free website building tools out there and yes you can build your own website in much the same way as you could cut your own hair, file your own tax return, or even do your own legal work. But for most people, it wouldn’t be advisable.
At Smart & Slick, we pride ourselves on professionalism. And I’m not just talking about professional web design, although being able to create almost any design or feature we or our clients can think of is certainly a very solid plus point.
But professionalism goes much further than that. Because like we say all the time, you don’t really want a website – no business does. You just want to sell more. And it so happens that in this day and age, having your own website provides you with a way of doing that, when it’s done right.
It’s not about the website – it’s the content of the website that matters. And that’s what we spend most of our time creating.
Professionalism as a web design agency is about possessing and utilising a range of different skill sets. Graphic design is one of them. Coding is one of them. But also, understanding marketing, copywriting, SEO, our clients businesses AND the people they’re trying to sell to.
Because unless we know ALL of that, we can’t help you with what you REALLY want, which is to look good to your audience, communicate competence and value to them, and ultimately sell more stuff.
Increasingly, your website is likely to be the first point of contact between your business and any prospective customer. This is true because it’s still the most easily accessible marketing asset available to you. This means that for most of your prospects, your website IS your first impression. And as the old saying goes, you’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression.
So when prospects visit your website, they’re JUDGING you. They judge you on how smart your website looks and how slick it is to use. That is literally why we’re called Smart & Slick.
The free website design services can provide you a code-free way of creating a website, but there will always be limitations of the tool, they cannot teach you how best to use it, they cannot teach you design, they cannot teach you all of the skills we’ve spent decades learning.
And when you hire us, all of our years of learning and practising what we do means that we can create really high quality websites THAT SELL.
I think the other major reason why hiring a web design agency like us is essential is for the support. We build robust websites and one of our guarantees is that your website will never break, ever. But in the event anything did ever go wrong, you can sleep easy, knowing that we’ll be able to fix it for you.
Whether you can build a website yourself or not, SHOULD you? Running a business is difficult. It’s an all consuming endeavour and there are many, many things to get done. As the person running the business, is your time best spent by building marketing materials? Or should you spend more time on servicing clients and drumming up business, as well as all the other business admin that needs doing.
In software engineering there is a concept called the Single Responsibility Principle. What it means is that any function (a bit of code that does something) should only do one thing. That way, if it breaks for any reason, only one thing is broken and it should be fairly easy to identify what’s wrong and how to fix it.
Since learning about this, I’ve taken it to heart and applied it to my whole life and business. One person cannot be in charge of everything. It’s unsustainable and impossible.
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