The High Cost of DIYing Your Website

With DIY website platforms like Wix, Squarespace and so many others, it’s so easy to create your own website these days. In fact, your 12-year-old kid could probably set it up for you!

But, those template sites don’t create any of the content you need to effectively communicate what you do and how it solves your customers problems. Creating the messaging and visuals is the hardest, most important and most overlooked part.

You’re likely losing out on a lot of business if you created your own website and you don’t even know it. Here’s why…

Content that converts

If you aren’t an expert communicator and created your own website, or hired a website designer who didn’t help you create the content (which is often the case), it’s likely ineffective and losing you business. If the organization and content on your website is ineffective, you just have pages full of information, not an integral part of a marketing and branding strategy designed to motivate people to take action.

Navigation

When your website is difficult to navigate the content on your website, people tend to give up quickly. I’m talking seconds here. If your site and images take more than a few seconds to load, they are going to click away. If they can’t find the information they are looking for in a few seconds, click! Gone. You have to be able to communicate quickly what you do and how you solve their problem, in a couple sentences, with easy to follow calls to action. 

It sounds simple, but narrowing down your entire message into one or two sentences and visually communicating it as well, is difficult and very hard to see for ourselves. Speaking of visuals, the right photos and videos can make or break your website. Humans make meaning of visuals 100’s of times faster than we can read words. In fact, you may not even need words to communicate what you do.

SEO

If nobody can find your website, it’s useless. Search engine optimization is one of the tools you can use to make sure people can find you online. A good website designer will help you set up basic SEO through keywords on your site. Be careful, however, because there are a lot of people out there selling expensive SEO services that simply aren’t necessary for every business. It all depends on what you offer and how you plan to reach your target audience.

Aesthetics

If your website looks 20 years old, generic, unprofessional, hard on the eyes, or other horrible “design” people will judge your business to be exactly those things. First impressions are everything. Not only does your site need to be organised, function properly and be easy to navigate, it also needs to look good, preferably designed to reflect your carefully created visual brand identity.

Attracting the Wrong Clients

When your website looks cheap, old fashioned, unprofessional, etc. it’s going to attract clients who are looking for those things. How do you want to be perceived? Your “looks” need to match your offerings. If you find you’re constantly getting inquiries from the wrong type of people and they took a look at your website before contacting you, you might have a website problem.

The Cost?

So, how much are all of these mistakes costing you? You may not even know because people either can’t find you, don’t stay on your site long enough to get to know you, can’t find what they’re looking for, judge you to not be the solution to their problems or are put off by a bad design. 

What’s the value of one more client? 10? 100? What about higher quality clients who are easy to close after they’ve visited your website? 

If any of the above are problems for your website, the value of investing in a new or redesigned site will pay off in spades over time. Trust me! I’ve seen it over and over again with my clients.

Are you considering a website redesign, or skipping the DIY process altogether? Book a 15 minute call to see if we’d be a good fit to do it for you.