Web Designer Secrets

If you’re looking for a web designer, you might be missing the boat.

“You don’t know what you don’t know”, as they say, and what might be in your blind spot are a few tricks to look for in choosing a web designer.

The first big expensive mistake business owners and sales-driven professionals make when choosing a web designer is focusing on price. This is exactly how people shop, when they don’t know what to look for, and how to sell a good site from a poor one. The better way to shop for a website is based on price-per-closed-deal or price-per-lead. You could have a $5,000,000 web storefront that makes you $30,000 a day in profit that is actually a better “deal” than a free website you designed yourself over the span of a few months using online tools. A bad site will “leak” traffic out the “back door”, like pouring water into a sieve, while a great online storefront will create a river of hungry leads, or better yet, online purchases, causing money to simply show up in your bank account each morning.

If you’ll notice above, I use the phrase “online storefront”, which is a better way to think about any website that has a business agenda. The old way to think about a website was like a brochure, and as such, business owners truly didn’t get much value out of them, nor would they spend much money developing a site. A good site will rank high in the search engines, provide the backbone of social media marketing, create and grow your opt-in mass email list, and produce either leads for you to “convert” (sell to) offline or actual online orders.

One other mistake that many web designer artists will make is separating search engine optimization (SEO) from the creation process. In years past, many SEO providers marketed their services as expensive “magic dust” you’d sprinkle on a website, causing it to magically rise in the search engine results. This is frankly snake oil, designed to keep you in the dark and glued to a $5,000 a month retainer package. The truth is SEO does cost money, but some of the most important parts you can and should do yourself – because you’re the expert. If you’re too busy, get an employee or staff member to share some expertise with the world. When your web designer does their job correctly, you’ll have a control panel that makes adding pages to your website as easy as sending an email or editing a word processing document.

In years past, websites were often held under lock and key, and changing anything on your website meant you had to pay the web designer, wait weeks or months for changes, then leave it alone. These days, a good web storefront is a fluid, busy place of business that’s easy to manage, constantly evolving, and easily found by clients who need your service.