Professional website designers lose count of the amount of time the following statement has been uttered, or variations thereof, when the question of whether a business requires a website: “no it’s ok, my friends son can do websites and is sorting me one out“. This is usually followed by a call some months later to the effect of: “my mate’s son built me a website but it’s awful and isn’t in Google . . . can you help?”!
This is an all too prevalent issue and it’s understandable, particularly in today’s economic climate that ‘the bargain’ is searched for when looking to employ any service. However, there are so many pitfalls with IT and website design and development that by and large this can really be false economy. The range of skills required to design, develop, host and maintain a website can be wide and varied and it is nigh-on impossible to find someone with no industry experience who has learnt to make a web page using Microsoft Front Page during an ICT course at school who would have anywhere near the depth of understanding and technical ability to produce a website that will serve the purpose for which it was built.
It’s not a matter of just ‘having’ a website but a matter of having a website that is graphically eye-catching, contains logical/transparent navigation, is written with well optimised/keyword-rich textual content, has all the correct coding practices in place, conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium website coding convention guidelines, conforms to accessibility guidelines etc, etc, etc. In fact, there are dozens of principles that need to be applied to produce a good website that again someone who doesn’t work as a professional in the business wouldn’t know. Furthermore, there is a vast difference between web animation, web design and web development for example and an amateur ‘Jack of all trades’ is not going to be proficient in all areas sufficiently to do them justice leading to a website that is deficient in key areas.
Obviously, we are a website design, website development and search engine optimisation (SEO) company and so would be pro the professional approach but from experience with our client base, many of whom had gone down the ‘friend’s son’ approach previously, we can say hand on heart that it’s tantamount to throwing money away in most instances!
