Building a car’s transmission and a website share one similarity. Both are incredibly complex to build; demanding specialized skills and focused attention.
Can you build a car’s transmission? If you are a trained mechanic, sure. But if you are a business owner, will you ever consider construct your car’s transmission from scratch? Of course not. Because trying to assemble a car’s transmission would be impossible without mechanical expertise and will also take a lot of your time.
The same is true when building your website. From coding the right features to security, correct graphical elements and structure, a website has many aspects that need to be perfected for it to serve the business well.
You, being a small business owner, already sport one too many hats. Managing the supply chain, finances, and customer service of your business, building a website yourself will only add to the responsibilities, and how many hats can one wear? With too many on, one of them is bound to fall off.
Even if you think you can manage to develop a website while running your business, do you think you have the right expertise? Because if you are not a web design and development expert, the task of creating a website will not only take your attention away from your entrepreneurial responsibilities but may also yield unsatisfactory results that can prove to be detrimental for your business.
How can a bad website be damaging for a business?
Your website is your business’s representative in the online world and can work to either build or demolish its reputation. If the website works optimally, it will contribute to the business’s growth. But if it fails with even one of its features, it will put your business’s image at risk.
The most critical feature, lack of which can destroy the website and your business’s reputation, is security.
Homemade websites often lack the security that is critical to protect a business website. Being a small startup, you may not have much at risk in case of a hacker attack, but you might still have your customers’ payment credentials or personal information, which your business cannot afford to lose.
Moreover, without essential web security protocols, you may put your website at risk of malicious redirects. Malicious redirects occur when a hacker sneaks into your website and injects malicious script into its source code. Such injections redirect your domain to some other, possibly questionable website, leaving a significant mark on your online business’s image.
Suppose you have an online flower shop. You decide to build a website for it, but due to a lack of web development expertise, you do not enable adequate website protection, which allows a hacker to sneak in. The hacker edits the website’s source code to redirect its domain to a shady website.
Imagine your targeted customer who comes looking for flowers but lands on an inappropriate adult website instead, courtesy of the malicious redirect. This customer will not only run away from your site but may also tell his or her friends to stay away from it. In this way, one malicious redirect will end up ruining your reputation significantly.
Another factor that compels web visitors to leave your website is its load time.
With patience running low, the limit of how long a person will wait for the website to load shrinks. And for every second your website takes to load, it loses essential prospects who may have bought your products and contributed to your business’s growth.
An optimal website thrives on website speed optimization. Without the relevant expertise, you may neglect this critical requirement, leading to a slow loading website that may attract visitors but fail to retain them.
Remember how your website represents your business in the online world? For a good representation, the website needs to have aesthetically pleasing graphics, attractive typography, and a functional layout, among other features.
With no experience in web designing, you are at risk of making the wrong choices for the graphical elements of your website. Consequently, your website can end up being confusing, cluttered, and disorganized.
Such websites lack proper structure and scream untrustworthiness. They tell without saying that they have been built by people with no web design expertise and fail to retain web visitors, let alone propel them towards conversion or engage them in business.
A website lacking structure is difficult to navigate for humans and complicated to scan and index for the search engine crawlers. And both humans and robots do not have the time to stick around and understand the website first and then continue using or scanning it.
Developing a website structure is like planning to build your car’s transmission. Just like the clutch, engine, and gearbox of a transmission system must be interconnected to make the car move, all your web pages must be linked together and well-laid out for the website to be functional.
For a good website structure, you need elaborate planning, understanding of web design principles, coding expertise, and knowledge of your target customers’ expected interaction with your website. With a small business to run, it would be a lot easier to let an experienced web designer, like Landau Consulting, a NJ small business web design company, design your website so that you can take care of other aspects of your business.
Moreover, once you have created a website, do you think the job is done, and now you can concentrate on running your business? Unfortunately, no. When it comes to web development, the job is never done because it is a continuous process.
Building a website and running one are two different things. Once your website is made, you cannot set it aside and expect it to function optimally for as long as it exists. In due time, it will come across issues like broken links that will demand reevaluation and optimization.
Broken links direct visitors to a page that no longer exists or has been changed. If you don’t take care of such links initially or fail to come back and check on them regularly, your website may get laden with them.
A website with many dead links will not only frustrate the web visitors and drive them away from your website but will also demolish your reputation in the eyes of the search engine crawlers who associate the presence of dead links with outdated and abandoned websites and don’t usually rank them high in the search results.
Talking about high search engine ranks, you cannot ignore search engine optimization or SEO while creating a website. SEO helps a website appear among the search results and brings web traffic. Neglecting SEO best practices while developing a website would mean that it may never interact with the visitors it was built to engage.
Just like building a car’s transmission needs mechanical skills and planning, a website requires intuitive web development, creative web designing, and SEO expertise for the website to be functional, optimal, and profitable.
You wouldn’t consider building, rebuilding, or even maintaining your car’s transmission system yourself. Then why would you attempt to build your own website knowing you can end up doing more harm than good?
As the saying goes, some things are better left to the experts. Let a professional web developer, like Landau Consulting, which offers web development in NJ, take care of building and running your website while you focus on what you are good at, which is running and expanding your business.
Landau Consulting is an NJ small business web design company and a web development agency that helps entrepreneurs run their businesses successfully, expand online, and conquer the digital world with a safe, optimized, fully managed, and neatly coded website to align with your business goals.
You can check out their website at Landau Consulting or contact them directly. They will build a personalized website for your business to help your business grow and they will not be building any auto transmissions either.