Website from a template VS custom professional design

Website from a template and custom website design both have their advantages and disadvantages. Which one is better depends on your business needs and the goals of your website.

Website templates save companies a considerable amount of time and money. There are a lot of template options available in the market to choose from for your website and you do not have to rely on a professional website design firm to get the desired look.  These templates are user friendly and do not require professional expertise.

Template-based websites, however, are not very unique and other websites similar to yours may already exist in the market. Templates usually put limitations on the amount of text you can enter in the web page and if you try to insert more text than desired, it may change the layout of your page, giving it an unfinished look. If you do not look for reputable sources for templates, sloppy coding of some templates may hamper search engine optimization and other necessary updates.

It is, therefore, in your best interest to get a custom professional website developed from trained professionals. While templates may save you time and money in the short-run, a personalized design will always be more beneficial in the longer run. 

 

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Having a professional firm design a website VS hiring an intern or work with students

For a start-up business, it may be tempting to save some moolah on website design and hire an intern or a student to create one. Such businesses, perhaps, do not realize the importance of a professional website design.  Your dot com is your greatest marketing tool and its significance cannot be undermined. The expertise and finesse that professional website design firms bring to the table may be missing when interns or students work on your website. You need to hire someone who has industry experience and who has worked on similar projects before rather than relying on individuals who are learning themselves.    

The advent of SEO has completely changed the way websites are designed and developed.  The content of the website is as important as the actual design. Your website ranking on search engines and its popularity are determined by SEO and professional SEO firms have the know-how to make your website search engine friendly, turning it into a marketing machine and attracting a lot of visitors.

I am sure you can use an intern to organize a file cabinet or to update your mailing list. For your company’s website, let the professionals do their job.

 

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Website SEO in Today’s Business

Website SEO is of paramount significance in today’s corporate world. SEO is the process of improving the traffic to a website from search engines such as “Yahoo”, “Google”, and “MSN” etc. (via organic search) for targeted keywords, and has become a buzzword among today’s marketers. Several businesses similar to yours may exist on the web. How will your potential customers find your website when so much competition exists?  This is where SEO comes in handy and makes the content of your website more relevant and “search engine friendly.”

Search engines use programs called crawlers or spiders that follow the links from page to page and analyze, index and add a page to the database. SEO can work for almost all businesses- whether it’s SEO for real estate or SEO for a doctor’s office.

To keep up with the competition and to be in front of your potential customers constantly, SEO is the way to go. Get a professional website design, optimize it with keywords specific to your industry, create proper links and monitor the performance of your website to shine on the web and to reap the benefits of an amazing online presence.

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User-Friendly Web Design

The ultimate goal of a website is to serve as a marketing tool for a company’s products or services. End users or potential customers visit a website to gather information and make informed decisions about investing in a particular product or service.

Text layout and simple navigation are very important to ensure that the users get the information they are looking for when they visit your website. Too much clutter and animations annoy the user and the purpose of providing useful and timely information is defeated. Your web design should also be in conjunction with your branding and the image you want to portray for your company. For example, a law firm web design with a goal to depict credibility should have the color scheme, content and layout in accordance with that goal. Use of vibrant colors, cartoons etc will not be appropriate for such a website. Such sassy web design, however, will work beautifully for a kids’ website.

A website is, usually, the first interface of a potential customer with your company. Visitors of all age groups, from all walks of life will be visiting your website. Hence, keeping the design simple and up-to-the-point is very important. The entire exercise of designing the website and writing the content can become futile if your design is not able to capture and hold the user’s attention.

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Website Content Importance

Good and relevant content on your website is as important as the “look and feel” of the website. People get so involved in the design and development of the actual pages that creating appropriate content for their target audience usually takes a backseat.

 

Companies get their website optimized for search engines- to improve ranking and gain popularity- and the content of the website plays a key role in achieving this. Once a draft of the content is created, your professional website design team can use that as a guideline to better design the website.

 

Writing the content before the website design team takes over your project is a good idea. It helps you to identify your goals and the same can be communicated to the website designer. It will give them a clear understanding of the project goals and your expectations, which, in turn, will help them translate your vision into a reality.

 

Pay attention to the end users or your target audience while writing the content. It’s not about using fancy words and flowery language. It’s about clear and concise communication, and choosing right words that can be easily comprehended by your website visitors.

 

Take time to think about the content of your website and complement that with professional website design and professional SEO. Next steps? Be ready to welcome a huge amount of traffic to your website!

Professional web design

The price for professional web design has gone down dramatically due to the new technologies developed by the leading software engineers.  For example: a simple 10 page website that used to cost about $3000 and did not provide neither friendly user interface or needed functionality.

Websites build today take up less space, load faster, have professional look and feel, and managed by their owners or company employees with CMS  (Content Management Systems)

Website with CMS is a portal with news, events, main content and anything you’d like with 1 big difference: you can manage all the content without ANY knowledge. It’s like editing a Word document. You can put up a video, image or animation by simply dragging and dropping. 

Solutions like lat are usually offered by full service web design companies.

Take control of your business – hire a professional web design company

Many companies consider paid advertising with google and yahoo these days. For many companies paying five dollars a click is just not affordable anymore. There is another way: you could setup a web marketing campaign. Many web design companies offer SEO and web marketing services. Instead of spending all your marketing money on Pay-per-Click advertisement these companies concentrate on distributing small ads web classifieds along with articles to blogs and include links to your website. These ads not only attract actual readers they also attract search engines that register the link going to your website. This way your website gets higher ranking and as a result more qualified traffic through organic search results.

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

Another thing that will help your ranking is constantly changing content on your site. High-End web deign companies offer content management systems for your site. Using the system you can update your site content on the fly and is is as easy as editing a word document.

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Content Management a SEO tool

Some professional web design companies provide their clients with a content management system (Website CMS). Having your website content change is very good to improve your search engines rank. Affordable Boston web design company may take care of all this headache for you. They will blast your product/service all over the Internet and make necessary changes to your site in order to be more search-engine friendly.

It takes about 2-3 months of posting to see good results and get fully propagated in all search engines. Since Google is your top priority you may choose to add google adwords™ campaign. This way google’s spiders come to your website more often and your website gets treated like a special customer.

There are many things you can do to make your website more visible but I would recommend having a professional web design and SEO company  do that for you.

Have you considered Web-Content Management system?

These days having a simple static website is simply not enough. Companies strive to get more business from the web because it is widely spread, very accessible and highly affordable: when was the last time you bought the airline tickets through a travel agent? Today companies offer web design for real estate, web design for lawyers and doctors  – there is a major difference of websites like that: they require complex content management system to control the website. For example real estate companies can manage their listings in the web based database and if they wish post them (listings) to the company website! Isn’t that exciting?! Now many other companies catch up with the technology.

Designing an E-commerce website can be a hassle for one programmer, but today’s technology allows web design companies to have many people working on the same project without loosing precious time managing the responsibilities.

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