WHY YOUR N50K WEBSITE IS A WASTE
Considering the economic factors surrounding the Nigerian economy, small and medium-sized businesses jump on every Tom, Dick, and Harry running around with a laptop, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP skill giving them an offer to build a website for less than an N100,000.00 as compared to the standard $5,000(N1,800,000) website.
In general opinion, this cheap website is the most reasonable, economical and inexpensive solution to their problem but do these websites help these businesses reach their potential and achieve the goal a website is meant to help them achieve?
To go further, every business must understand the need for a website; the difference between a freelance web designer and a digital design & development agency; and the technologies involved in achieving internet visibility & discoverability.
Also, we would discuss what is worth your money & what is not, what matters and what doesn’t and lastly What to focus on and what to toss out the window.
The Need For a Website
Business Credibility: 30% of customers won’t consider patronizing unless your business has a website. 97% of consumers go online to find and research local businesses. Therefore, your business can have an edge over its competitors when you own a website.
Free Visibility: Having a professionally developed website means having a website that can appear on top of searches made from search engines like google and bing which in return drags traffic to the website which more or less would end up converting to clients and customers. This is mostly not the case when the website lacks SEO and is built by a roadside developer.
Saves Time: Since a website is hosted on the internet it is mostly available for 24hrs/365 days. This means prospects can access information concerning your business including who you are, what you offer and how they can contact you without actually communicating directly to you.
Social Media Reach is Diminishing: Owning a Facebook, Instagram and Twitter page for your business doesn’t guarantee your place on the internet. These platforms hosting your business can not only shut down at any time, leak your customers’ details and also can lose your data at any time, but they also don’t solve the problem a website does(complete information about your business, show your business is credible and saves both you and your customer’s time)
The Difference Between a Freelance Web Designer and a Digital Design & Development Agency
Originality: Before a website is launched, a wireframe & prototype is designed and a user-testing is done to check if the design is user-friendly & if it is easy to use before the actual website is developed by the software developers. Digital Design & Development Agencies provide specialists including
- UI Designer
- UX Designer
- Front End Developer
- SEO Developer
- Digital Marketers
who works hand in hand to take the project from prototype to complete projects while freelance doesn’t have the luxury of employing a designer, a user experience designer, a front end developer and most especially not a back end developer. That said, most freelance web designers use templates(predesigned website), editing it’s content and swapping it for your business’s content.
SEO: A website’s visibility and precedence in search results from queries on search engines are completely dependent on how well the website was optimized for search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an expert skill most freelance web designers don’t possess but since digital design and development agencies have the luxury to employ professionals, be sure your website would be findable on search engine results.
Credibility: Working with a design agency that has a reputation to uphold is the best option for businesses because they do not want to go below the expectations of their clients so they use the best developers, marketers, and designers because of the fierce competition in the industry. Also, a freelance might be busy with other projects after the launch of your website but a design agency works promptly and has more room to support returning businesses.
What Should You Choose?
What is Worth Your Money: Unless proven otherwise, owning an ineffective website is an unnecessary investment. Therefore, if you’re going to hire freelancers, you would need to follow a process and hire the following experts starting from
- A UI/UX Designer to develop a wireframe and complete prototype of your proposed website, using your brand’s theme colours and typography(if such exists),
- A Frontend Developer to convert the designed website to code,
- A Backend Developer to design the database and user interactivity with the site and the backend also, to host the site with your domain,
- An SEO Expert to make your website searchable and visible to search engines.
Otherwise, all you need is to hire a digital design & development agency that would handle all these duties at one overall quote.
What Matters and What Doesn’t: If you don’t really care about the discoverability and Originality of the design on your website then you can go for a freelancer but if your website is more complicated than a mere personal blog then a digital design & development agency is definitely the smartest option since it offers diversity in expertise from planning to developing. Most importantly, you will be dealing with a unified team committed to delivering your website on time and according to your expected quality.
What to Focus on: Generally every business is interested in converting prospects to customers and building a professional, original, discoverable & user-friendly website is one of the best ways to attain that goal.
If you are still irresolute about which decision is better for you, talk to us today and we will describe in detail how we work and what we can do for your business.
Madsuite is a principal digital agency with trustworthy design and development expertise. We help startups and businesses to design engaging web and mobile experience for their clients.
We understand how much pain in the ass it is to deal with customer experience while trying to work out strategies to improve your business and acquire more valuable customers, so we exist to serve as your ever-reliable IT backbone, with a dedicated staff always ready to listen to you and your needs and proffering quality solutions.
so hit the contact button, let’s make you better while bettering ourselves alas iron sharpeneth iron.
