Why You Need a Professional Web Design Company, Not a Freelancer
Published April 26, 2013 | 
If you want to save money on web design the statistics prove that you’re better off paying a professional web design company than hiring a bargain freelancer. This might sound totally out of the question if you’re working on a shoestring budget, but there are several reasons why “cheaper” will prove to be more expensive in the long run.
The Data is in, Most Marketers Don’t Know What Their Customers Want
It’s not uncommon for a company to hire a freelancer web designer, tell them what kind of website they want created, and end up with a site that gets little or no conversions. This happens because the website is usually created to please the business owner rather than to please their customers.
Maybe you don’t believe you belong in this group, but according to a study by e-Strategy Trends, most companies don’t know what their customers really want. For example, 59% of marketers believe that the most valuable use of social media sites is to provide insights to help their customers make buying decisions. 58% believe that customer service is the primary function of social media sites.
However, a startling 83% of consumers place a higher value on deals and promotions through social media sites while another 70% value rewards programs more. The statistics on search are even more sobering. iMedia Connection reported that 78% of internet users use the web to do product research and nearly half of all daily searches are searches for information on products and services.
Those customers aren’t looking for “call us now” or “buy now” promotions either. According to Bing search engine, Yelp, Zaggat reviews and dozens of other research agencies, customers consult peer reviews and in depth information about products. Still think it’s a good idea to hire a bargain web designer as opposed to an experienced web design firm who understands marketing?
If so, here’s one more statistic you might want to know about….
SEO & Web Design Are Interlinked, And Agencies Do Better
Marketing Charts.com reported that 21% of businesses who work with agencies on SEO are satisfied with the results. Meanwhile, only 11% of companies are satisfied with the results of doing their SEO in-house. So your chances at producing satisfactory results are twice as good if you choose an agency. Of course, you might pay more money in the beginning, but you won’t have to waste money having your site redone when you realize it’s not getting results.
The most important reason to choose a professional web design company is that they won’t always give you what you want. They’ll give you what your customers want. There’s a huge difference, and that’s why MSI believes that good web design is a job that should be left to the professionals. Call us now to find out why.
Your customers are waiting.
3 Startling Statistics Reveal that Your Web Design Strategy DOES Impact OFFLINE Sales
Published April 25, 2013 | 
Did you that know your company web design strategy could dramatically impact your offline sales? According to Forrester Research, a whopping $1.1 Trillion of all retail sales in 2011 were “Web-Influenced.” That’s a staggering statistic, especially considering that only $173 billion in total sales were made online.
Now, think about your online presence, your company website, your blog, your social media pages. How easy is it for your prospective customers to find you online? Is it easier for them to find your competitors’ websites? Is your company website providing content that will properly educate your customers on the value of doing business with YOU instead of with the competition?
If not, that’s your first clue as to why your offline sales aren’t where you want them to be. Is it time to hire a professional web design team yet? If you’re still on the fence, let’s see just how much of an impact this statistic could have on your industry in 2013…
Is Your Industry On This List?
According to the Forrester Research study, there were a handful of industries which had offline sales that were most impacted by online research:
- Automobile
- Education
- Furniture
- Financial Services
J.D. Powers and associates estimated that a mind-boggling 90% of potential car purchases were made after doing research online. Can you imagine what this could mean if those customers found valuable information on YOUR website about how to make a smart purchase?
Or, what could it mean if your competitor (aka, the brick and mortar business just down the road) currently has a website that outranks yours in the search results? What if THEY are providing valuable and relevant content? Content which is designed, not just to sell, but to educate potential customers on how to make a smart purchase decision?
If so, maybe it’s time to do something about the sales your missing out on because of your lack of a strong online presence…
Are You Paying the Hidden Cost of Poor Website Design?
Are you starting to see the hidden cost of NOT having a well-structured, high ranking website with great content and an email form which allowed you to collect your customers’ contact information and contact them BEFORE they find your competitor?
If so, you need to pick up your phone and call MSI right now because 2013 is going to be the year to build a strong online presence.
Several online research firms have estimated that in 2013, the number of offline sales influenced by online research will increase dramatically. Future Google search updates will continue to reward sites which are user-friendly, engaging and full of good relevant and informative content.
Will your business be ready for it? Will you continue to lose opportunities because customers searching for solid information about making a smart purchase decision either aren’t finding your website or are quickly leaving it because they find only advertisements instead of the information they need to make a good purchase decision?
If this concerns you, call MSI immediately at the number on this site. If you become the “go to” source for influencing offline purchases, you’ll dominate your competitors online AND offline.
What’s the Difference Between Web Design and Web Programming?
Published March 12, 2013 | So you’ve heard of Web Design Services, and you’ve heard of Web Programming Services.
What’s the difference? Do you have to hire both…or can you just work with a designer? Is it a good idea to hire one person for your programming and your design work? If you need both, should you hire a team or a separate individual for each?
In this article, we’d like to share the difference between a web designer and a web programmer and what you should know before hiring either one.
How Web Designers Differ from Web Programmers
If your website were a physical building, web programmers would be your construction team. They’d do all the technical measurements; they lay the foundation, create the wood or steel framework, lay the bricks install plumbing and run the electrical wiring.
The web designers on the other hand, would be like your architects, your interior designers and your landscapers. They’d conceive and create the esthetic features of your building. They’d choose the paint colors, the landscaping, the shape and design of your windows, your doors and the types of materials used on the outside (stucco, bricks etc).
So by working together, web programmers and web designers can create a well-structured, attractive website; one which gives your business a great chance of succeeding online.
Unfortunately, web designers and web programmers can also get in each other’s way. There are three ways this can happen…
#1: Web Designers Can be Bad Programmers
Some web designers position themselves as “one stop solutions,” for web programming and for web design. But there are a few reasons you might want to hire a team which includes a web programming specialist and a separate web design specialist. The primary reason is that some designers can be sloppy when creating complex code.
One example of this is “code bloat.”
Code bloat is where a programmer uses 50 lines of programming code to accomplish what could have easily been accomplished using 10 lines. Of course, the extra lines of code don’t make your site look any different. But every time your site loads, it has to load all 50 lines of code into the user’s browser instead of just loading ten. This difference can be measured in milliseconds, but imagine that multiplied by 100.
That’s how code boat slows down your load times. Web programmers sometimes have to correct these problems, which isn’t easy since they’re working with someone else’s code at that point. This can be avoided by hiring a team of two or more specialists instead of working with a “one man show.”
#2: Web Programmers Can Make Life Hard for Web Designers
Good web design is important for marketing, so you want to make life easy for the person who is polishing up your site. However, since web programming has to be completed first (or simultaneously with web design), your web programmer and web designer have to play well together.
If your web programmer is a sloppy coder, it can be hard for a designer to just zip in and add the code required to make your site look good. Ask any web designer how hard it is to work around a sloppy programmer, you’ll get some horror stories. This eats up time for the designer, which means you’re paying them for more hours of work than you should be.
It’s also harder to make changes even to simple design featured if the site was poorly coded by the web programmer. This is especially important if you’re building a site with dynamic interactive features. Web programmers use languages like JavaScript, PHP & MySQL. Web designers use simpler languages like HTML and CSS code.
This is why it’s a good idea to find a web programmer and a web designer who are both specialists at what they do AND who are used to working together.
#3: Web Programmers & Web Designers Can Have Communication Breakdowns
Most web designers are artistic types. Web programmers tend to be more technical.
Can you imagine the potential for miscommunication? Miscommunications can create delays and cost you more money than you would have paid by hiring a team of specialists who is used to working together. Remember, web designers and web programmers both work by the hour and the good ones aren’t cheap.
Do you want to pay $50 to $80 to $100 an hour for miscommunications between a web designer and web programmer? This is why you want to hire a team who has been working together for a while. Most important, find a team with a project manager; someone who understands marketing and SEO and who communicate with you about your business goals.
Few web designers are marketing experts and even fewer web programmers understand marketing, usability and how to create a good visitor experience. Your website is the only representation of your company which some customers will see; so pick a team of specialists who can give you the most value possible for your money.
How Much Should You Budget for Web Design Services?
Published March 7, 2013 | Whether you need web design and development services, for a new site or to overhaul an existing site, you’re probably wondering how much you should budget. Web design services range from the dirt cheap range of a just few hundred dollars to web sites which take tens of thousands of dollars to create.
Even if you have a ton of money to spend on your web development project, you want to budget for your long term business success. In this article we’d like to share some smart budget tips that will help you do just that.
#1: Good Structure First, Esthetics Later
The most important element of website design is structure. Think of this like building a house. You want to build a strong foundation, a good plumbing system and you want the house to be strong enough to withstand the local weather conditions without becoming uninhabitable. Likewise, in web design, your basic site structure is essential to your long term success.
Site structure can impact user experience, your search engine rankings and even determine how manageable your website is for your webmaster. The challenge is that while it’s easy to spot faulty architecture in the real world, poorly designed websites are harder to spot.
A site that looks great may rank poorly because it’s not fashioned with the overall goal of the website in mind. It might not be structured according to your content marketing strategy. It might have excessive code in places or be hard for search engines to find and index. Structure problems in web design can also be complicated and expensive to fix. Sometimes, the entire site has to be rebuilt.
So if your budget is limited, invest money into the structure of your site and leave the bells and whistles for later. The end product might not look as pleasing, but it’s much easier to dress up a site with pleasing graphics than it is to rebuild a site that’s “ugly to the bone.”
#2: Be Willing to Invest in Quality
It’s tempting to spend only a few hundred bucks on website design and assume that you’ll upgrade later when you start making more money. But if you go too cheap, your site might not make enough money to justify more work being done. Find a website design team who understands the principles of good search engine optimization and who knows how to make your website immune to future SEO updates from Google, Yahoo or Bing, even if it means paying more money.
In business, cheap services really aren’t cheap. They can create complicated problems later on, problems that can only be repaired by professionals. If these professionals know that you’re desperate to repair a problem, you’ll have no negotiation power. You’ll be stuck with a big website overhaul bill, or you’ll dump a lot of money into SEO and few only menial results.
If the higher end website design companies are too expensive, ask them for a quote which includes minimal graphic design. Have them start by building a great architecture for your website. Remember, you can always add the fancy graphics later on.
#3: Budget Something for Promotion
One of the primary mistakes business owners make in hiring web design firms is blowing their whole budget on design and leaving nothing for promotion. If you want traffic to your site, you’ll want to plan ahead and conserve a budget for hiring content writers, investing in Pay per click traffic and hiring someone to handle your social media.
You don’t want to assume you’ll handle these in house and on a zero budget either. Most companies don’t have teams in place who are well trained in content marketing, pay per click and social media. Give your website a chance to work its magic by adding fresh, informative, well-written content and by hiring someone to manage your social media campaigns.
If you’re ready to start your web design project, we’d love to talk to you about your online business goals. There’s a phone number on the upper right of this website where you can speak with one of our specialists. Call us now, we’ll make sure your web design is done right and that you have the best possible chance at success.
What Does Your Web Design Company Know About Marketing?
Published February 19, 2013 | Before you hire a Web Design Company, we’d like to share some tips about effective website design, tips that will help you make a smart hire. Small, medium and even large businesses sometimes blow thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on fancy websites, only to find that they’re not getting the traffic and leads they expected.
This happens because a great looking website doesn’t guarantee you traffic or sales. So when hiring a Web Design Company, here are three things you should look for before signing a contract.
#1: Good Designers Aren’t Always Good Marketers
Marketing is a part of everything you do in business, including design. If you hire someone who has a good eye for design, but who doesn’t “get” marketing, you could end up with a website that gets a lot of compliments from your family and friends, but no traffic and no new sales.
This is why, before your Web Designer Creates one line of code, you should clarify the goal of your website. Your online marketing goals will determine your website’s structure, its navigational layout and its interactive features. It will even impact how your graphics are designed and placed.
A well designed and well-structured website can be a powerful marketing tool, but a well-designed and poorly structured site can be a big waste of money.
A good web designer will ask questions about your objectives for capturing leads, making sales or increasing credibility through your website. If your web design company isn’t doing this, you’ve probably got someone who doesn’t understand marketing. Of course, if you can find an award winning Web Design Company that has a strong marketing background and expertise in SEO, go for it.
But if you can only choose two out of those three, you’re better off working with a company who understand how to get you traffic and customers.
#2: Good Designers Aren’t Always SEO Experts
SEO is rapidly evolving, but the basic principles of good on page SEO haven’t changed that much. Your site still needs to be organized according to your content. You still need a site that loads fast, and user experience is still very very important. But there dozens of other nuances which impact your SEO, and even experienced web designers don’t know about them all.
This is why you need a Web Design Company who understands SEO. If shortcuts are made (intentionally or unintentionally) in the basic structure and design of your site, correcting them later could be expensive. Remember this when you’re looking at a Web Design Company’s portfolio. Pay attention to how their other websites are ranking.
Of course, design isn’t the only factor in getting good rankings. But if you find a Web Design Company whose websites are consistently ranking well, you know that the site was probably well-designed from the beginning.
#3: Budget for Value AND Long Term Success
While you never want to go cheap on your web design, you should also know that a well-designed site will only get you so far. In the early days of the internet, you could create a website and starting getting traffic right away. Today, the internet marketing place is far too competitive for a brand new website to get loads of free traffic.
You’ll need a long term content marketing strategy and an SEO strategy to ensure future traffic and rankings. So don’t blow your entire web design budget on getting your site created. Some companies do this and have nothing left to invest in getting traffic to their site.
Treat your company website is like a storefront in the physical world. You need it to be attractive and intuitively structured for handling loads of traffic. But just as a brick and mortar business has to invest money into getting traffic, you’ll need a budget for getting traffic to your web site.
We can help you do both of these. If you’re ready to start your website design project, contact us at the phone number on this site and let’s talk about your online marketing goals.
Posted in Website Design | 
marketing goals, marketing strategy, web design company | 
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