Why Hire A WEBSITE DESIGNER?
Save Time and Get Better Results
In an earlier post, I explained how Software as a Service (SaaS) website builders offer better value for small websites than self-hosting a WordPress site. Many of these services promote themselves as do-it-yourself (DIY) solutions with no designer or developer needed. So when should you hire a designer, and when should you do it yourself?
Describing your business to a 5-year-old forces you to get to the heart of what you do in simple terms. Articulating what you want to achieve with your website to a designer begins a conversation bounded by the constraints of the medium and particular platforms. It also lets you build off a designer's expertise in a constantly evolving body of knowledge on how to best leverage the tools. A first-timer might be able to google random solutions but not fully understand the context and priority of the issue.
A Website designer can help with:
Scope REFINEMENT
Discussing what your business does, who your customers are, and your website's purpose with the designer will help prioritize needs and direct the selection of the right services and the creation of a reasonable feature list.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Different business markets develop a common baseline of clientele expectations until someone breaks the mold with a new look, new services, or redefines the market around a new clientele.
SEO ANALYSIS
An analysis of common search terms that identify customers in different stages of the purchase funnel. Researching the vocabulary used in successful competitor sites is a practical way to identify current baseline terms.
UX
Identify established patterns of visitor behavior on your existing site. Your new site should not disrupt successful traffic without a good reason.
Making it Pretty
Of course! That's what designers are known for.
If you're starting from zero, a graphic designer can create a visual identity that's appropriate for your business and can be applied to your website. Start with your logo and the color palette of your office decor, signage, and stationery first, as these can be harder to change than your website colors.
There are two approaches to your website design. It can be included as an add-on to a very holistic (and expensive) process of branding. Or it can be treated somewhat autonomously by a web designer, after you've locked down your company's visual identity with a graphic designer.
Bear in mind that a graphic designer and a web designer will have different constraints and priorities.
LOGO
Logo design is very subjective. It's time-consuming for a designer to understand your business, and the final product will be used by your business in a lot of contexts, so expect to pay for quality from a specialized graphic designer. Be aware that trademarking and ensuring originality of more minimalist logos can be a very expensive undertaking. The simplest approach is a logotype that displays your business name with a font that conveys the appropriate mood. It worked for Google.
COLORS
Before you lock down your business colors, make sure that your designer is aware that there are regulations governing web accessibility that chiefly relate to the contrast between different size text and background. You can address this with a color palette that works in all contexts or a web specific palette with modified colors.
FONTS
Legibility on smaller devices and different lighting conditions means avoiding fonts with letters that can look similar like 0 and O. Minimizing the number of different fonts, styles, and weights can improve load times.
VISUAL CONSISTENCY
Your clients will likely interact with your business over several services besides the marketing website. The degree to which they can be integrated will range from showing logos and matching some colors, to creating the illusion of a single website by precisely matched interfaces with HTML and CSS code tweaks.
SPEEDY, EFFICIENT PROCESS
MANAGING INPUTS
On a small project, it would be costly to hire a full service agency to manage copywriters and photographers with corresponding markups on top of what these specialists might charge independently.
A web designer might have referrals or point you to DIY resources:
Copy
Great copy communicates. A copywriter can write in your best voice and understands what makes your customers tick. A web designer might provide light editing and make SEO suggestions. An AI editor can be a good compromise for polishing your drafts into effective copy.
Photos
Photos are great for products, but services must navigate issues of privacy and the difficulty of capturing an activity in an attractive image. Take the best photos you can afford of your business and yourself; there are AI tools that can polish them significantly. Don't discount stock photography to convey mood or a satisfied client without showing specifics.
EFFICIENT ITERATIONS
The real value of having someone experienced set up your site is freeing your time to make decisions only you can make and letting the web designer build the site to a professional level.
The best results come from iterative back and forth as copy and images are worked into a design.
A experienced designer will have a process in place which uses proxies like work in progress, stock images, and rough prototypes to guide decision making. As the project progresses, the proxies will get closer and closer to the final finished product.
An organized designer can setup a project schedule, deliverables, and milestone meetings needed to make decisions about content, features and appearance in a timely manner.
OUTPUTS
At a purely technical level, just having a second set of eyes reviewing your website will catch things you've overlooked. There are lots of i's to dot and t's to cross when setting up a website. An experienced website designer will be faster and get you better results with:
PAGE SPEED
Your website's fonts and photos need to travel to a wide range of devices with different connection speeds. According to Google, most mobile visitors give up if they don't see something from your site within 3 seconds.
IMAGE QUALITY
The different formats that work best for photos vs graphics. Support for different formats is constantly changing. Processing photos to get the maximum impact balances image resolution, detail, compression settings, and final file size.
SEO
Structuring content and creating metadata for best SEO practices. Setting up your categories and tags to make the best use of a template's presentation of collections of products and blog posts.
FINAL SETUP
Connecting your name registry and hosting. Setting up Analytics and Search Console.
UPKEEP
Most small businesses either publish regular newsletters or update their social media through their websites, or update it rarely.
The first group tend to handle updates themselves, the second work with their original designer. Your designer should guide you to a robust platform, set up integrations with newsletters and social media platforms, and help you make design choices that will be the best fit for your future needs.