With all the attention devoted to producing well-designed and effective websites, one big part of running a business is getting your website designed – most people I know who have tried to make their site professional-looking fall at least somewhat short of the mark.
The thinking is this: I’m not a designer. I’m a business owner. I just want to make my business look good, right? This mindset presents a fundamental dilemma: If it’s important to run a successful small business, it’s important to look good, right? Unfortunately, the opposite is true, at least in many ways. Being an owner means you are mostly responsible for your company’s every move. So instead of doing all the creative work, you need to do all the work. When you design your website, you are responsible for hiring the people to do the art, and you will quickly discover that you are not very good at doing art. You will also discover that it is not easy or particularly intuitive to do art. If you do all the work, you have no time to get great products to the marketplace. If you do all the work, you have no time to get great results. The picture is clear. If it’s important to run a successful small business, it’s important to look good. It’s for this reason that I have never been a big fan of businesses that pay workers to design their websites for them. That’s a traditional way of doing things, and I think it often is quite effective. However, in the current world of rapid technological change, it’s also likely that this old model is a lot less effective than it was, because the work that designers used to perform has either not been eliminated or has been redefined. There’s a simple solution: hire professional website designers. I make a point of reminding people of this when I talk to small-business owners about their website problems. When I describe how you should change your tactics to have the best chance of making the best use of talented and creative designers, I generally tell them, “Make sure you pay the people who are taking care of your website.” There are two key things to keep in mind. First, having a professionally designed website actually costs money; it does not come out of thin air. Second, the cost of hiring a designer can be divided into two large components: Cost: To hire a designer for any site, hire professional designers. Costs vary a lot. I would suspect it would cost you somewhere around $4,000 to $8,000 to hire a developer on a monthly retainer, just to keep your site up to date. Another $4,000 to $6,000 would be spent on the designer’s services (in addition to your retainer fee). Wainwright Associates is a good source of experienced, skilled designers, and their prices are very reasonable. The fee works out to about 1.8 percent of your site’s worth of revenues. Admittedly, these fees are not as good as flat-rate charging, but they’re still a lot better than nothing. Instruction: You will generally get the designer to do very little teaching. This is a good thing. However, the process of building a site will be one of explaining to the designer what you want your site to look like. This is probably a good idea; I’ve seen the design process that goes along with a website building brisbane and it’s hopeless. It involves a fair amount of mindless diagramming and an awful lot of thinking through symbols. This is not how you want to run your business, so I think it’s very important that you hire someone capable of explaining this step of the process. My personal view is that the best way to do this is through online classes. Certainly, if you sign up for a 90-day course that takes you through step-by-step design fundamentals you’ll learn a whole lot. However, if you want to hire an experienced designer, you should absolutely consider hiring a workshop. I would recommend doing a Google search for “domain name and online workshops.” Why should you look for a tutorial when a professional designer will do most of the teaching for you?
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