A Free Website? Not A Good Idea??

These days, almost anyone can put up a website. The problem is… almost anyone can put up a website these days.

As the internet is becoming less and less difficult to publish to with the help of tools like Front Page and iWeb. It is quite common for small companies to fall victim to the thought of, “Oh, we can do this ourselves for free!”.

While software like these do make it easy for anyone to make a quick website, and with iWeb perhaps an ascetically pleasing one, they make no effort to make the website fast and lean. (Even Apple doesn’t use iWeb for their website)

You wouldn’t know unless you were familiar with languages like HTML. But these tools tend to fill the pages with unnecessary code and scripts that make the site slow to download and hard to read for the all-important search engine i.e. Google. It’s very important that the coding of a website complies with internet standards for browser compatibility and loading speeds. You wouldn’t want your site to break on a potential clients computer.

So what’s a thrifty business owner to do?

Hire a professional of course!

If you really want to use your website for good deeds, like capturing valuable leads, then it might be a good investment to hire someone who knows how to build a site that can attract search engines and lead visitors to the goals in the site. Stephen Covey advises to always begin with the end in mind if you wish to be effective. The concept is just the same for websites as it is your life. Building a website can be a very important decision for a company. A well-planned website can add a significant revenue stream for a company. A not-so-well-planned website can just site on the internet with no friends coming to visit and even cost $5,000 to build. Yes, I’ve seen it happen.

Why am I telling you this? It’s very important to spend time mapping out the goals and content of a website even before the design process begins. After all, without knowing what the goals are, how would we know how to design the layout to achieve those goals? It’s important to remember ROI when planning your website. It’s a marketing tool. Possibly your most effective one. If your site sells a product, it should be built to sell it with as much ease and speed as possible. If your site collects leads, it should be built to lead visitors to the conversion forms without any snags along the way.

By the way, that animating navigation that plays on every page…  That would be a snag.

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