Web Design: Should You Hire Someone or Do It Yourself?
So you need a website. You are not sure if you should hire someone or learn HTML and do it yourself. Consider these points before making your final decision.
Web design is an art and a science
A good web designer is worth their weight in gold. There are literally a thousand and one details you will need to know before your site should be live. These details include designing a clean, easy to use user interface all the way to proper search engine optimization techniques. Can you learn these details? Sure, but how much time do you have? Unless you plan to do web design for a living, hiring a web designer could save you hundreds of hours and lots of mistakes.
Web designers: Things to consider before you hire anyone
When looking for a web designer, there is an expression that comes to mind. Web designers are a dime a dozen but good ones are hard to find... Just because your cousin's friend's brother's sister can put together a website for cheap, it doesn't mean that it won't end up costing you big time in mistakes and missed opportunities. A bad design will cause your website visitors to leave right away. If the website they create isn't put together properly, they may not be able to be crawled by the search engines. Any website created by an unknowledgable web designer could prevent you from getting any website traffic.
How to tell a good designer from a bad one
How can you tell a good one from a bad one? First place to look is their prior work. Ask to see their portfolio. If they don't have one online, ask them for the web addresses of three or four websites they have recently completed. Look the websites over. Do they grab your attention? Do they feature clean lines and easy navigation? Do the websites exhibit the same kind of professionalism you'd like to have for your website?
Web design: Is it worth paying someone?
Your budget will obviously have an impact on how much you will be willing to pay a web designer. If you have the necessary skills, hiring a web design may not be necessary. If this is the first website you ever attempt and you are planning to make money from it, hiring a designer could be one of your smarter moves. On the other hand, if you are simply putting up a personal site, doing it yourself will provide you with invaluable experience. I would suggest that you shop around, narrow the choices down to three, then choose the one you feel most comfortable with.
Joe Duchesne is the president of Yowling. They provide web design services as well as business web hosting. Reprint freely as long as you keep the keyword rich clickable link going back to my website from this resource box.
