Biggest Mistakes When Working With A Website Designer

Over the years I have seen business owners continue to make the same mistakes when working with a professional website designer or agency. These can prove to be detrimental to your business in the long run, and can even hurt your ranking in search engines. In this article I am going to break down the common mistakes most people make, and how to avoid them.

Going Too Simple

While it may be tempting to follow the “KISS formula” (Keep It Simply Stupid), I personally don’t recommend doing this for website design. While you do want your website to be somewhat basic, you don’t want your website looking like it’s straight out of the 90s.

Modern websites need to be responsive, meaning your site should resize to match the screen of the device someone is viewing it on. For example, good websites are built to look great on both smartphones and computers. Going too simple means neglecting best practices when it comes to modern website design..

A website with a few headings and buttons is not going to achieve your business goals. Your site should present you as THE professional in your niche or industry. Having a plain white background and only text makes you look incompetent.

Not Thinking About SEO

This one is huge and can have real world consequences if you aren’t careful. Your website has to be built with Search Engine Optimization in mind if you want to get customers from Google. The reality is that approximately 46% of Google searches are people looking for local businesses. You are missing out on a lot of business if you are not showing up online.

Many website designers will build sites that look absolutely beautiful, but that aren’t built well for ranking in search engines. This results in the entire website needing to be rebuilt down the road. You don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for a new website only to have to have the whole thing rehauled.

It is important to find a website designer who is also proficient in SEO best practices and who has a portfolio of websites that he/she has ranked #1 in Google. If your website designer doesn’t have this, it is probably a good idea to find someone else.

Having A One Page Website

While “one page websites” have been a trend for a while, they perform very poorly when it comes to ranking in Google. You need to demonstrate your authority if you want to rank, and that means lots of pages with content on them. Additionally, site architecture (your page URLs) are crucial in any decent SEO strategy.

For example, let’s say you run a bakery in Los Angeles. If you want to target people looking for catering, this should be the URL of your catering page: /services/catering-los-angeles/

This URL structure has been specifically set up to be heavily optimized for SEO purposes.

Google now understands catering is one of the services you offer. Additionally, you have specified location relevance by having “Los Angeles” in the URL.

Not Using WordPress

WordPress is by far the most powerful SEO platform out of the box for building your website on. Nothing comes close by a long shot. There is a good reason over 40% of websites on the internet run on WordPress.

Besides just optimizing for Google search, you should be able to edit and backup your website if you ever need to. Even if you don’t have the time or expertise, it is always a good idea to work off of a platform that allows for basic edits without coding knowledge.

This is one of the biggest benefits of having a website built with WordPress. While a professional website developer can indeed modify your website or add custom functionality via code, you need to remember that Google likes fresh content and websites that are constantly updating. Your website should evolve over time with new pages, blog posts, and fresh content.

Being Held Hostage

Unfortunately, many website designers will try to lock you in for future profits for them. If you ever need future website updates, they will bill you for them. At E-Man Ink, we teach our clients how to edit their own websites. We build everything in WordPress so people can do their own edits if they ever need to after we finish building their sites.

If you hire a website designer, make sure to get the WordPress login for them when they are done editing the website. If they refuse to provide the login, you are going to have a bad time if you ever need website updates done in the future. That means you are stuck with that person to handle any changes you need made.

Paying For A Custom Solution

Unless you have a specific need for a feature or are a large corporation, most small businesses need the same standard type of website. Typically you will have the following pages if you are a small local business:

Home | About | Services | Blog | Contact

Usually that is enough for most local businesses, minus additional services pages for SEO purposes.

Some website developers will try to convince you that you need to have a custom website built from scratch using HTML and CSS, or PHP. This is usually a huge red flag. If it’s something that’s custom built, that means support and future updates can only be done by the one who built it. Like I mentioned before in the last point, you don’t want to be held hostage by a greedy developer.

Conclusion

At the end of the day the reality is we are not all website designers or developers. Chances you as a small business owner you already have enough going on and just don’t have the time to figure out how to build a website yourself (nor should you be expected to.) Building a website takes technical expertise and it is way easier to hire someone who is specifically an expert.

While most website designers are great, it is important to keep these red flags in mind and make sure to not get taken advantage of. Knowing what to look out for in advance can save you a ton of time, money, and frustration.

If you are looking for website design in Niagara Falls at an affordable price, look no further. E-Man Ink builds websites that achieve your business goals.