You are finally ready to take that next step in your business; showcasing your services, products or expertise online. You decide it is time to have your own company website.
Then when push comes to shove you find yourself with a heap of information, terms you can barely distinguish and mile long price and features lists. A few words slapping you in the face are web design, web development, website design and Internet Marketing.
You might shrug them off as different names for the same animal and neglect asking what they mean and how choosing one over the other affects what you get.
The low down.
A lot of companies on Aruba have websites that score very low on Hubspot’s Website Grader grading tool. This counts for websites that have been around for way longer than 5 years and have high numbers of inbound links and MOZRank.
A lot of these websites are product of website design; just the bare minimum of work and planning plus zero marketing. You will find that the titles, headings and filenames are not optimized for search engines and to top it off they are tied to limiting and debilitating “service” packages. Try changing the logo, pictures or add more email accounts, and you’ll find yourself with a lot of waiting, hassle and probably an offer to upgrade your service package, aka more costs.
How this affects your company varies depending on who your target market is, if you ever get found via the search engines, that is. It is especially crucial to know or have the support of a knowledgeable partner in this journey.
It’s very important to determine what you want your website to do for you. Is it to increase sales, build a relationship with clients, attract new leads, entertain, educate, engage and activate, showcase your unique expertise or just being a digital flyer?
Your answer alone should affect whether you choose design or development. — And soon you begin to see that more thought and careful planning needs to go into your website!
The differences between design and development
Truth be told, you could do without a designer, if your developer has great internet marketing insight. This means they are up to date with the relevant best practices to help you work towards getting your ROI. This also means that getting a website should not look like the process of getting a new business card design.
Below is a list comparing website design vs. web development.
- Basic graphic design vs. In-depth goal oriented development: Your website should not be just a pretty page people see online, where your logo shines. It should include advanced internet marketing practices to ensure visibility, readership and conversion. Your website should get you found, keep visitors coming and turn those visitors into leads and customers. By simply having the look worked on without doing some planning, research and targeted implementation your website will fail to reach this objective.
- One time activity vs. dynamic tracked continuous process: The website design process often looks like this: Basic 5-10 page site with basic company information, this is dumped onto the internet for people to see, end of process. How often will visitors return, knowing the content will never change? Not that often! The internet is all about where the eyes are, and to keep the eyes on you, you need to be dynamic, engage your visitors and give them something for their time on your website. But before you know how to do this, you need to be on the ball, and continuously track your performance.
- Limitations vs. Freedom: A web developer will take into consideration your objectives when selecting a platform for your website. Too often I have seen designers dress up as developers, offering CMS that is easy to use for the client. Just edit title here, menu name, and content. The problem is, that’s also it! You can’t change anything else, easily add images or new pages. This varies from CMS to CMS, which is the area you may get to log in to to change content as needed. Some packages are even more restrictive, allowing only a set number of pages per package, having no FTP account, no user interface for changing content and limitations on email accounts. A web developer should in any case foresee growing internet needs and advise a package that leaves you room to grow beautifully and become the traffic magnet you deserve to be.
These are ONLY three points I covered in this article, my post is getting very long and there really is a lot to say about this topic. Which is why I will be writing a few more covering other aspects to help you identify what you need, on a side note, the truth is that in the next few years you will have wasted your time and money if you get only the web design package. i see it on a regular basis, customers come in wondering why no one finds them online and what they should do to see traffic increase and what’s next after that.
Sites that have no RSS, no conversion forms, no newsletter/subscription forms, sites that try to sell something without the possibility to do it right away online and websites with no new information are just glorified business cards, they accomplish nothing more than say where you are, that you are and that is it. Make it a good one, and let your website show who you are and why your company should get the visitor’s email, trust and eventually business.
Now we’re talking!