If you run a micro business, your own consultancy or freelance business, or are just setting up your own company, you’ll obviously be conscious of costs and the need to organise your budget. Getting friends and family to help out with some aspects of your business can be very useful, and the cost savings can really help your business get off the ground. However, when it comes to creating your business’s website, an enthusiastic offer of help from someone who fancies giving it a go could well backfire, resulting in lost opportunities and sales. Here are the main reasons why you shouldn’t ask friends and family to build your company website (even if they offer to do it for free).
Looks are only skin-deep
You may well know an enthusiastic teenager who’s keen to test their IT skills by putting something together for you. With free templates available on platforms such as WordPress and Wix, it’s now possible for them to create a website that looks the part. But will it be good enough for business use? There’s a lot going on behind the scenes of a website. Getting noticed by Google and the other search engines isn’t as easy as merely having a nice-looking website that reads well.
Does your friend or family member understand the need to build your website to be search engine friendly, which means fast loading times, responsiveness across all devices, ease of navigation, user-friendliness, and security? Are they up to date with building websites that take into account the latest algorithm changes? Do they know how to choose, use and size photos and images that benefit, not hinder, the website?
By using enthusiastic but inexperienced people to design your site, you may get a cheap or free website now, but you’re more than likely to end up paying for it in different ways, such as in lost business because people simply aren’t finding your site or they get frustrated because it’s not fast enough or user-friendly enough so just leave it and go to a competitor’s websites instead.
With an inexperienced web developer, you may also experience more technical problems with your website, leaving you at a greater risk of being hacked. This means you’d need to source help from specialists at short notice, which could turn out to be expensive not only in terms of paying for technical help, but also in terms of loss of customer business and trust.
Cariad Web Design websites don’t just look great and come with SSL security as standard, they’re also optimised to be more visible to search engines to make it more likely that potential customers will find your company. In addition, you can opt for our monthly support and maintenance add-on, giving you greater peace of mind that the same people who designed your website will be on hand to install updates and fix issues whenever they occur – all as part of your pay monthly website packages.
Professional web developers understand the business world
Having knowledge and experience of the world of work gives professional web builders a huge advantage over someone who’s just starting out or still in education. With many years’ experience under their belts, our professional web developers understand not only what your business needs from a website, but also what works and what doesn’t. We won’t have an experimental ‘suck it and see’ approach to your website because we know exactly how to create one that will work hard for your business from the very start – possibly being launched in as little as 10 days!
Before we start work on your website, your client services manager and web development team will meet with you to discuss your objectives and advise on the best way to achieve them. Combined, our in-house team has digital marketing expertise and business experience as well as web-building skills, giving us a business overview that will give you a great advantage.
What happens when there’s a problem?
Say you ask your best friend or someone in your immediate family to build your website and they do a terrible job, or take far too long to get anything done, or produce something they think is fantastic but you really don’t like. Have you thought about how that will affect your relationship with them? Would you simply make do with what they’ve done so you don’t upset them? In which case, you’d be sacrificing potential business just to keep the peace.
Friends and families often think it’d be fun to go into business together… until they go into business together – when you blur the boundaries between a personal relationship and a professional relationship, you could end up treading a dangerous path.
When you hire Cariad Web Design to build your new website, you’ll not only be dealing with objective and experienced professionals, you’ll also be dealing with an accountability hierarchy, enabling you to deal effectively with potential issues before they become a problem. And you won’t have to sacrifice any friendships in the process!
Do better business with a professionally built website
With Cariad Web Design, you can get all the advantages of a professionally built website at a price your business can afford – in fact, for as little as £99 a month. Our websites also offer you the flexibility to add-on products and services as and when your business can afford it to improve all aspects of your digital marketing. Talk to us to find out how we can help. day to discuss your new website requirements.
