Benefits of a professional Web designer

Trust the professionals

Would you hire a beautician to build an extension on your home for you? Of course you wouldn't! Then why would you allow anyone other than a professional Web designer or Web developer to build your business Web site? This is your livelihood! Its success is crucial and some things just have to be done by people who know what they're doing.

Of course, a cheap or free Web site is a very tempting offer when you have to work within a small business budget. What many business owners don't understand though, is that any commercial Web site, whether it's a money making business or a not-for-profit organisation, must be built to certain standards in order to live up to its potential. Did you know that there are laws attached to the accessibility of non-personal Web sites for people with disabilities? What that means is a person with a vision or mobility impairment must be able to access and use your site with the aid of assistive software (software that's specially designed to use voice commands or a keyboard to do everything the rest of us can do with a mouse - like click on links and use browser buttons and menus). A professional Web designer knows how to build this functionality into your Web site ensuring that it complies with the Disability Discrimination Act and that an entire section of the population isn't excluded from your available market due to poor Web site design.

A professional Web designer or developer also has knowledge of how to optimise a Web site for search engine visibility. It really isn't just a case of building a page and taking up that great sounding offer of submitting it to "the 10,000 most popular search engines" - in fact, that offer could potentially end up getting you permanently removed from the important search engines!

A large portion of the work I do as a professional Web designer and developer involves what I call 'rescue cases'. They're Web sites that have been poorly built by either uninformed or lazy 'Web designers', hobbyists or amateurs and they're usually badly in need of a structural and design overhaul.

Here's an example; I was recently (September 2006) asked to put together a proposal for someone who already had a Web site for the small business he'd just bought, but he didn't feel that it was a great Web site and he wanted to improve it. He said it didn't get any visitors and he thought that overall ‘it could just be better’. He told me it had been built cheaply 'as a favour' by a friend of the previous owner of the business and that £100 (about US$200) had covered the cost of the Web site, a year's hosting and the domain name registration.

So I took a look at the Web site...

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