In the era of social media and e-commerce (a.k.a. Facebook, Amazon and Co.) even a small business needs to establish an online presence. This is not up for debate anymore. The following is an analysis on the di erent aspects of web-design for small-business owners, for example what is really needed and what that implies. Now, a common thing that I hear people say is: "Why should i spend money to hire a web-designer when I could just build a site for free with one of the many online-tools?".
Creating a website yourself
There are many tools out there that o er a user interface so you can create a simple site without any knowledge of coding or to much worries about design. But very often the free website builders only o er restricted features or limited templates unless you subscribe for a monthly fee of up to 50$. If you want a high-quality site you will have to pay one way or another. And by the way, prices for the services of a professional web-designer have never been as a ordable as they are today.
Word Press is actually pretty revolutionary [research on WP] it keeps the work flow simple enough, so that an average internet user can easily be interested in building a simple website by himself. All you need is a short amount of time to explore the tool and some more time to watch some tutorials on YouTube (there are even possibilities for more advanced users to create more enhanced sites by adding custom code, and investing more time).
So, as you might already have guessed, the main ingredient for quality is (aside from a rudimentary knowledge about the internet) time. If you have some of this precious resource to spare you are all set to design your own high-quality website. But since nowadays nobody has enough time, especially small business owners which have to work a lot and simultaneously manage the business, the resulting portion of small businesses without a website is extremely large: almost half of them [1].
The Design
Web-design agencies usually dedicate a great part of their time to create a custom design that ts the customers vision. If your website is appealing to the eye, the potential customer will most likely stay longer and maybe even buy something: the rst impression counts [2].
UI and UX are two terms that play a major role in all possible online-processes. UI stands for User Interface and UX for User Experience. In order to provide high-qualit UI and UX, a web-designer can rely upon his experience in these areas to better showcase your product and optimize the potential of your internet presence.
Development
After the question of the design for your website is resolved, the more expen- sive aspects of web-presences have to be considered: the integration of more advanced functionality into your website. For example online stores, the kind of thing that gets tricky to do by yourself, especially when multiples features are required, which is a must as soon as one does not sell a single product.
Imagine programming and then managing your online store after watching hours of tutorials, online courses and downloading the right software, while you simultaneously have to run your business. Sounds impossible? That is where the skills of a web-designer start (or rather continue, depending on your internet-affinity) to be become indispensable.
Domain and Hosting
Choosing a domain name for your site is a further part of the process of establishing an online presence. This choice can easily result in some diculties because so many catchy names and combinations are already taken by some other party around the world.
After resolving this issue, a bigger one comes up: where and how to host your domain? Your website also needs to be 'stored' online, as to always be available to potential customers, i.e. your website needs to be hosted on some server, where users can access it by calling the URL in some browser (it mostly is preferable to have the domain and host in the same place/service but it's not a necessity)
Optimization
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. As most people do not tend to memorize complete URLs, it is not sucient to have your page on the web, you also need to be found by search engines. In order to do so, one very important skill is the art of the so called copy-writing.
This is the difficult approach to provide the content in a most interesting manner for the customer while also presenting it simple and optimized for search engines at the same time.
Maintenance
Once your website is up and running you will need to update it regularly with the newest content in order to keep your customers up to date. This can be done in various ways, the probably cheapest and most generic one being via the already mentioned web-design tools like Word Press. In order to achieve a higher degree of quality, web-designers can individually update the content of your site or offer an interface with which you could do in on your own with more limited possibilities.
Convenience and Time
Convenience is surely a major bene cial factor, you only have to deal with one agency for all your internet related needs. A web-design agency could o er you all these services in a bundle with a much more reasonable price as if you would take these services separately.
In coclusion, we humans usually justify paying for a service for one of the two following reasons: either we just don’t have the time to do it ourselves even though we could or we just want to trust a professional to do the job, someone who has insight and expertise in the field. The same rule applies in web-design too.