5 Things You Need to Know About “Cheap” Web Design Companies
With websites being so crucial to businesses these days, it’s important for you to spend some time on getting the right website for your business! You can easily get a website designed within a week, and the cost can be as low as one to two hundred pounds. If your budget is tight, you might end up choosing one company over another because of the cost. But doing so could cost you more in the long run. The difference between a good website and a great website may seem subtle to most people at first, especially if you’ve never had a website before, but the benefits of one over the other would be very noticeable after about 6 months or so, depending on how hard you market your business and what sector you are in.
You’ll need to ask yourself how much time and efforts YOU are willing to spend on the website. Do not rely on your web design company to do all the work for, because they can’t, especially the ones that offer you websites at below market value! So if you are going to use their services, make sure you are aware of the followings:
- Research – They will spend very little to zero hours on researching your business or your competitors. This is extremely vital, because if the designer doesn’t have any knowledge about your business, he/she is giving a piece of art, and not a solution to your problem.
- Design – They use templates that have been shared and used by thousands of people around the world. They may change them slightly, but the overall look and feel are usually the same.
- Structure – Your website will most likely not be hand coded from scratch, which means the structure would be meaning less to vision impaired users and search engines. Unless you don’t care about getting found on the major search engines, then this won’t be much of an issue for you, but say no to free traffic?
- Layout – This is just as important as the other above. Most cheap web designers have little to none marketing knowledge, and they make design decisions by using their right brain(that’s the creative side in case you didn’t know), what that means is that you will get something that most visitors would say “that’s interesting” and then leave. Why? Because the design was not focused on getting the visitors to do a specific task.
- Search Engine Optimisation – Many claim that they can optimise your website with no extra charge if you use their web design service. I would suggest to avoid these companies unless they have a good reputation or are recommended by a friend. The truth is that a good seo job require more time than most people think. To fully optimise a 10 pages website would take about 5 hours at least, provided the keyword research is already done. Also, some businesses will be benefited with certain methods than the others.
All in all, not all cheap web design companies are bad. Now that you are aware of what some of these cheap web design companies do, you will be a lot more prepared than 90% of the people when approaching them!