6 benefits of having a professionally designed website

6 benefits of having a professionally designed website

Introduction

The recent success of template website builders and “drag and drop” website builders is plain to see. Companies like Squarespace & Wix have generated a multi million dollar per year industry.

The main marketing message these companies share is that they provide a means for small business owners and professional individuals to avoid paying large fees to web design studios and create a website themselves without any design or coding experience.

The problem with these companies that is often overlooked is that their business model is attaining the largest amount of user generated websites possible. Your website is a marketing tool. The more websites they have, the larger their net is to attract new clients.

They want to funnel new users in through seeing other peoples websites and to pay money for their premium services. An important aspect of website visibility is Search Engine Optimisation. And a large part of SEO is having backlinks. A backlink is where an external website links to your primary website. Every custom made website under these companies umbrella has several links to the parent site. Your website is being used to market their services.

The other widely ignored fact is that if you are using one of these services to produce your company website, you probably don’t know much about design, development or digital marketing else you wouldn't be using it.

It is perfectly possible to go to your local hardware store and purchase cement, bricks and other equipment, go on youtube and watch a few tutorials and build yourself a physical store on the high street. But you don’t, you pay a professional to do it to ensure a good job is completed and the store doesn’t fall apart.

Your website is your digital storefront. It represents your brand to potential clients. Why are you using a template or building it yourself when you haven't trained professionally in web design? 81% of shoppers now start their product research online. You cannot afford to drop the ball when it comes to your website.

Read on for the major reasons to avoid these services and let a professional like us handle your online presence for you

1. A template cannot achieve good User Experience design

First of all, what the hell is User Experience (UX) design? Well, if you want a detailed answer click here. In short, UX design is the process of starting the design of a website by conducting user research. It aims to establish the goals, pain points and functionality requirements of your unique users (no two companies have the same UX research outcomes) and translating them into a digital design to create a website or app.

The UX industry has exploded in recent history with 238,000 UX designers registered in the US. Facebook has rumoured to hire 70,000 new UX designers world wide every year to keep up with demand.

That's all good, but what does this mean for your business? Well, UX is incredibly important to the success of a website. If your website does not have good UX design it will lead to:

• Poor conversion rates
• Users leaving the site out of frustration
• No clear call to action
• Navigation issues
• Unclear purpose
• Poor information architecture
• Unnecessary information on page

So we know UX is important, and your users are unique and require their own personalised UX design - so it's logical that a template cannot capture the design your unique users require. Sounds obvious right?

One of the main reasons people choose templates is because they “look good”. In the world of UX there is no such thing as subjectivity, only data and results. It doesn’t matter if your website looks good visually but has no clear UX direction and does not generate results.

Your users deserve that you do adequate research and cater to their specific needs.

2. Template builders struggle to achieve good Search Engine Optimisation

Without an SEO professional working on your website to ensure the code matches compliance standards, new keywords are generated, backlinks are being generated and site content matches your business purpose you are not going to generate traffic. That is a fact.

SEO is a big industry and requires time, patience and accurate work. Good SEO can generate lots of traffic to your site from external sources and search engines and provide you with more revenue in the long run.

“But my template builder said it has great SEO!”. They say that, but go and test for yourself. Go on Squarespace or Wix and create a new website with fake company info and leave it alone once you’ve built it. Check back in a few months and see what traffic it has received. Pro tip: It will be close to zero.

Just like UX design good SEO is unique. You need to establish a clear strategy to receive any results. Google SEO requirements are constantly evolving and you need a professional to handle it month to month.

3. If you are using a popular template there are thousands of other companies with the same website.

Your company has branding. A logo, marketing content, leaflets, business cards. They’re unique right? Thats because its important to have a unique brand. You wouldn’t copy another company's logo right? Of course not! So why are you using a website that thousands of other businesses are using?

You are missing out on having a unique website design to stand out against your competitors.

4. Template builders do not come with custom traffic & sales funnels strategies

A “funnel” is a way you funnel traffic from a starting point furthest away from your website to your website to complete a specific call to action. This is often social media, blogs or company listing websites such as Clutch or Yell.com.

To give you an example, BlackSkull has a sales funnel. You’re on it right now. We create custom content about the industry, market it on our social media and paid advertisements to drive traffic to our main website to get users to submit emails to receive a quotation. That's a basic explanation but it serves a purpose for this point.

We have a clear strategy on how to gain new users, give them the information necessary to make a purchase decision and a clear objective with which to convert them. You don’t get that with a template builder.

5. A custom site is faster

Page load speed can make or break a website. The optimal speed for a website to load is under 2 seconds. Anything more and you exponentially lose visitors immediately before they read a word on your page. This is called the "bounce rate".

visitors stay on your page for longer, navigate to further pages and are more likely to convert when you have an optimal page load speed.

Template builders work by having code running in the back end of your site to achieve the functionality. When you drag a new image gallery, add an info carousel or basically add anything that isn't static text or images a new API call is added to your page load speed. The more widgets you use, the slower it gets.

Squarespace has a dedicated section on it, so it's obviously a problem users are concerned about. But why are the pages getting slower with more content? Squarespace and other website template builders use gigantic code frameworks to achieve their functionality.

A web professional knows the optimal way to set up your website without using frameworks or dependencies. Every website we have ever produced ranks in at under a 2 second load speed.

6. Running a templated site takes time and costs money

The age old business saying: “Time is money.'' You know this, you run a company. For every hour you spend tinkering and updating your site you are not using your time on day to day business tasks.

We’ve done our best to explain our business buzzwords in this article but there are hundreds more you need to know about to get the results you want online. Do you really have the time to invest into learning this entire industry?

Summary

Web design is confusing & complicated. Hell we know this better than anyone. We did a degree in the industry. Hiring us to manage your online web needs will not only save time, produce better results and provide security but you also get an experienced professional a phone call or email away if you ever need to talk about your new idea or campaign.

We serve clients of all sizes and budgets. Get your quote today visiting our website or sending an email to hello@blackskull.agency. We look forward to hearing from you!