You may think you’re saving a few bucks by opting for a DIY approach to website design. After all, you’re probably looking at dollars and cents on paper for initial costs. But what you don’t see are the high costs associated with a non-professional web site that will come back to haunt you later. Sure, we understand it seems like a lot of money on the surface. We understand you may be looking to cut costs as an emerging home care business. And we understand your website seems like the best place to cut those corners, especially when faced with not cutting patient care or employee payroll. However, we urge you to look at the big picture: professional web design will pay you back in spades later on. Trust us. Here’s why.
- Loss of Time: You can actually end up costing yourself more money in the long run by going it alone. Here’s how: you attempt to build your own website, invest a couple of hundred hours into it, but give up out of frustration. Then, you hire your neighbor’s kid to do it for you but that doesn’t quite work out. Then you go on Craigslist and find an “expert” who will do it for cheap, but they just end up taking your money and disappearing. So, here you are, a few months later having spent countless hours and a few thousand bucks (your time is valuable too) with nothing much to show for your efforts. You’re still stuck with a lousy website, with a lot of your time going wasted.
- Loss of Up-Front Money: In the same vein, consider that if you had just taken those few thousand bucks and hired a professional web design agency to help you, you’d have a beautiful, functional website that is meeting the needs of your clients as we speak. While the costs for long-term design and maintenance can seem high at the outset, possibilities are limitless when you align yourself with a true professional, says Entrepreneur.
- Depleted Resources: By handling the web design and ongoing management of your website by yourself, you’re reducing your potential to be helpful to other areas of your growing company. By spending so much time and resources (either doing it yourself or asking office staff to do it), you’re derailing your focus from where it really should be: growing the company. If you hire a web designer that uses a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you can still maintain control of your site going forward. WordPress allows for easy updates that you can do on your own, such as adding blogs and articles, while the web designer can handle the more difficult and time consuming tasks.
- Accountability: As the busy owner of an elder care business, the last thing you may have time for at the end of the day is maintaining your website and keeping it fresh. When you allow months or years to go by without updating content, refreshing the design, and adding timely blogs, you put your whole company at a disadvantage because you are showing visitors that your business is not a priority. With a professional web designer, you get regular updates and reminders about what you should be doing to improve your site. Many web designers add weekly blogs written by professional writers that you can place on your site to remain relevant in your industry. Implementing helpful content on your site – which is critical in attracting more visitors – takes a substantial amount of time which is already in short supply, points out The Houston Chronicle.
Plus, with a DIY site, you’re limited in your customization options as well as online help and support should you run into questions, says Small Biz Trends.
- Long-Term Cost: This is closely related to the long-term viability of your site and indeed your company. Without the right design and content to reflect your image, you could be turning away clients without even realizing it. This is a subtle yet powerful first impression people get when they land on your website, and they equate this with lack of pride in the business. They may just go elsewhere rather than call you for service, and that’s the worst case scenario because you’re not making those important conversions.
Contact A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing
If you don’t have the time, patience or inclination to tackle web design as yet another DIY project, choose the professionals at A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing for help. We offer expert website design, SEO and online marketing specifically for elder care businesses. Contact us at (760) 227-2720 for a free consultation or to find out more information about our services.
