The importance of having a website in this day & age is critical for any project, business or idea.
If you have a website, you will have the ability to not only communicate your message/product or service to new visitors, but you will also build trust around your brand.
For those of you who are still grasping the concept of websites in general, it's the equivalent of having a permanent newspaper or yellow pages ad, you know the big paper book almost everyone relied upon when finding tradespeople and businesses...
It's great having a website, but not so much when you haven't advertised it, as it would be quite hard for people to find you if you haven't posted it across social media channels, business directories or paid to advertise.
Either way owning a website puts you in control of what those visitors see, with full flexibility over how the website should function and the goals it should aim to achieve.
So this is a continuously ever-changing and conflicted question that has many factors to take into consideration, you will need to look into the scope and cost of a website and then discuss it with local agencies/freelancers to get a better understanding of the project at hand.
Since the boom of easy-to-use website builders in recent years, these solutions have allowed anyone regardless of experience in website design/development to put together a relatively straightforward brochure or eCommerce website.
And don't get me wrong, these are fantastic for certain non-profits, online communities and businesses that need specific requirements i.e. budget limitations, self-hosted with minimal security flaws, no need for updates, and a clean-looking website design that you control.
But, and this is a big but... those online builder solutions wouldn't really work for those with limited time, lacking knowledge in copyrighting, graphic design and/or have specific requirements that need custom workflows, requires integration with other systems and so forth...
There's a lot of work behind the scenes that go into website designing from discovery stages, wireframing (prototyping), UX/UI design, custom development and on-page SEO that really should be performed by those who have clear expertise and knowledge in these fields.
When it comes to cost the best advice again is to contact some local freelancers/companies/agencies and ask for a quote, perhaps speak to other business owners at networking events and even online forums/groups.
You should look to create an online presence wherever the majority of your audience can be found, social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest are great places to create an account to get posting those updates you've been itching to inform people of.
These social networks can help to convert visitors into loyal followers/fans, not to mention the fact that you can display your website link for people to find out more.
Furthermore, within a section of your website (usually the header or footer), you could also reference those social networks so anyone who visits the website first, can also follow you on those channels.
With great content published and responsive and professional interactions between you and the followers, trust signals and clear information/branding will be important when starting out online.
We've been hard at work over the past few months coming up with countless ideas on how to redesign our website so that we can showcase our services and recent work in a much cleaner layout. This also meant we had to learn what to keep off the new website version.. a lot of cutting back on the written content.. but this was a good thing!
We've listened to a lot of feedback over the recent year to realise that sometimes our website can become a little confusing to navigate and sometimes understand and this was also down to the amount of jargon-heavy content we had on each page.
We've decided to stop advertising the website maintenance plans on our website moving forward and only focus on the Fully Managed Plan as this has been a great hit with a lot of new customers lately. Don't worry, you can still find the maintenance plans via the client portal.
The most painful page to see for us was the portfolio page which didn't quite have everything we wanted on there.. for this reason, we've now added a little more detail to each project we work on from understanding the client, their goals and the final result. Giving you a much better insight into each project we work on and the impact it has on each business. Who doesn't like good results eh?
Make sure to take a look around our services page and portfolio, we hope you love the new website design and if you have any feedback or found any bugs please reach out to us.