Thursday, December 31, 2009

Hire a designer or design your own website?

Most people in internet marketing do not want to spend any money, which I suppose is fair enough. The trouble is that you cannot realistically expect to be a success without spending both time and money. Sure, there are the stories of 15 year old kids making a fortune, people down to their last dollar until they got the magic formula which miraculously changed their life forever.

Does all this sound too familiar? Have a look at the sales pages of the numerous marketers trying to get you to buy from their site and nobody else’s, and soon you’ll come across one promising the next big thing, where you will assuredly become rich overnight with no cash down.

They will also tell you that you don’t need your own website, just become an affiliate and send out 6 million emails to a free safelist. Of course you never read the thousand emails you get back in return, just like the people who receive yours won’t read yours either.

So you need a website to get traffic – the search engines don’t go looking for emails, they crawl websites. With a website, there are numerous avenues open to you to get traffic, and then hopefully make some money.

But should you design your own site, or get a professional designer to do it for you? It depends on the purpose of your site. Some of the most financially successful sites are only one page. Think of your own habits – do you go through every page on the sites you visit? It would have to be a very interesting site to entice you to do that.

So, for one page, you probably could design your own, buy a pre-made template, or use Wordpress, but unless you have artistic flair, and marketing savvy, you should probably hire a professional.

When you get a web designer to design your site for you, you are doing more than just handing over a job you can’t do to someone who can. Actually, by paying just a little money, you can let your designer think about all those little things that always crop up, and only get thought of halfway through the job. That way, you will be more focused and have more time to spend on your marketing strategy. Plus you will get your site up and running a lot earlier.

If the designers you hire are professionals, they should be good at what they do. Make sure you see some samples of sites they have designed before you part with your cash. By outsourcing your web design jobs, if any problems crop up, like links not working, you can always get them to fix it for you. They should be able to pinpoint the problem and fix it faster than you will ever be able to yourself.

Also, the site you get designed professionally will look a lot better than what you would have achieved because the designers have the experience you don’t. After all, designing websites is what they do for a living so they have to be good or they are out of business!