Why Your Friend/Nephew/Daughter Shouldn’t Make Your Website

It’s perfectly normal to want to cut costs when building your business, especially if you’re just starting out.

By all means go ahead and be as astute as you can be. Skip the fancy office paper, work out of your garage, and perhaps outsource some expensive tasks if you have to.

Just don’t go cheap on your website.

Resist the urge to ask your friend, your niece, or your neighbor’s kid to do it for you because you know that way you only get to spend a few hundred bucks or (OMG!) nothing at all.

Here are a few reasons why you’ll regret it if you don’t.

1. SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is more than just a few strategically placed keywords on your website. And a professional web developer understands that. Key factors such as site maps, navigation, security, responsiveness, and a host of others play a crucial role in making your website search engine friendly.

If your relative or friend understands this, then they may be savvy enough to choose a theme that promises some of these aspects.

But here’s the catch: there is no one-size fits all for every industry, and for every business. If there was, then web development as an industry would have already gone redundant.

A professional web designer should be able to sit you down to hear more about your business and its customers, in order to figure out how best your website can link the two organically via search engine traffic.

You could go for that, or settle for a website built exclusively on templates.

2. Usability

In the digital world today, it’s all about user experience. The best websites are those that cater to the reader on the other end, or in your case, your target customer.

The end user and their wants should be a central theme running at the back of the mind of whoever is in charge of building your website. That way, the result is something which is intuitive and truly useful to your target audience.

That’s usually not the case when you ask your friend, a friend’s friend, or a family member to do it. When you go down this route what lies at the back of the chosen developer’s mind is cost. So what your business ends up with is a website that might be easy on your pocket, but one which your customers might not be able to make sense off.

Visitors will decide to leave your website and never come back, once they realize it takes more than a few seconds to get the information they need.

3. Revisions and Updates

Launching your website is only the beginning. Throughout the lifetime of your website there will be a need for regular updates and fixes as the tech world and the needs of your target reader change.

If you’re tech savvy enough, you can do these updates and changes yourself. But most people rely on their developers to make these changes for them. In fact, continued and ongoing technical support is one of the first things you should agree upon before committing to any one developer.

With a friend you get nothing of the sort, and after the website gets set up you’re on your own to either sink or swim as you go forward.

4. Security

Hackers, spam, and viruses…the internet can be a tough neighborhood to live in. Your chosen developer has to keep security at the top of his priorities when building your website…and also afterwards.

Is your neighbor’s kid tech savvy, and experienced enough to provide this for you?

If not, you better save yourself from a world of regret and frustration by reaching out to a professional from the outset. The last thing you want is to cut corners at the beginning only to end up spending even more on professional service one year down the line.