a webmaster's blog

Some business owners will look to the shortcuts provided by the thousands of generic templates on the web as well as the design tools that promise a site in minutes to the amateur webmaster. These ideas might work out for you in terms of having a cheap, quick web presence but the truth is they are terrible for the long term performance of your business. Here are five good reasons to hire a designer.

1. Optimised For Your Needs

Unless your website is a simple blog with little additional functionality the chances are you have some content to display in a non-standard format. If you are selling houses your designer might include virtual tour functionality which allow visitors to look around before coming to visit in real life. A shoe store might need a stylish, modern online-retail catalogue. Whilst you can plug many of these features into a template they will look disjointed and often function poorly alongside your other content.

2. Unique

No matter what sector you’re in you can perform this simple experiment. Search on one of the major engines for all your competitors’ sites. Visit them all one by one. Pretend to be a customer for day, browse, explore their sites. Don’t take any notes. The ones you remember, the ones that make an impression days later either offer something unique in terms of service or offer something unique in terms of user experience and appearance. A real designer can deliver that unique experience and make your site stand out from the other sites in your sector. Be brave in your design choices and you’ll reap the rewards.

3. Search Engine Optimisation

Some systems are inherently fairly well optimised for search engines – for example WordPress usually uses sensible header tags for articles and setting up SEO friendly URLs is easy. However there are many significant improvements a designer can make. Everything from the order parts of the site are loaded to the impact fully optimised code can have will have a knock on effect on your search engine rankings. Templates will often be poorly optimised and therefore not only load more slowly which impacts on your customers immediately but will be picked up on by the search engines too.

4. Mobile Users – Responsive Design

Right now there is literally no template that delivers an excellent experience to mobile users. Some will present a site in an acceptable but homogeneous way to mobile users. As we already discussed this kind of ‘looks the same, works the same’ design really doesn’t make your site stand out. Not only that, but many ‘off the shelf’ choices leave you with users who have to do lots of scrolling or users who miss out on certain features. An experienced designer understands how to scale, move and adapt elements to deliver a fast loading, and most importantly unique site to your mobile users.

5. Content Advice

Hundreds and hundreds of online businesses have sites with literally no content. Their owners have picked a vaguely suitable template and put some address and general notes about their services online and have little else to offer. As a result they are rarely visited and the site offers little information to potential customers. A designer will have seen thousands of sites in hundreds of business sectors and can offer good solid advice about which areas you should focus your content on. They will follow this up by making sure your design allows your content to be accessed easily and with as few clicks as possible.

These five items combine to the ultimate reason why you should hire a real designer – your site will not only look great but will make money and be a success. Without one you’ll have a dry, featureless site that hardly anybody visits. Which would you prefer?

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Imogen Reed is a full time business insurance sales woman living in London. In addition to her main occupation, she provides freelance articles and blog posts for a number of publications specialising in web design, new media developments and Android technology.