DIY Design or Hire a Professional?

In our Do-It-Yourself (DIY) society, you can create your own web site but ask yourself this: Will my website look professional? Will it rank well? Will potential customers trust my business? With an amateur website, chances are the answers to these simple questions are "no". Web site development is not just about "How does my website look?" but most importantly "How does my website perform?". By performance, we focus on two things - the experience for the human visitor and the elements being sought after by the search engine crawler.

The average small business owner plays the role of customer service, sales, manager, accounting, marketing, etc. If this is you, do you really have the time it takes to create, publish and market a successful online presence? To create a website that performs, a great deal of time is required to learn web development issues like:

• HTML, CSS, XHTML compliance and validation
• Web design techniques that are accessible by all users
• Web page layout and principals of website navigation
• Browser compatibility for Internet Explorer and Firefox
• Operating system compatility for PC and Mac
• Database coding languages like PHP
• Proper keyword density and search engine optimization techniques

What about the graphical element? Most businesses, no matter how large or small, have invested in an identity such as a logo, business cards, brochures and advertising pieces. Do you know how to carry that identity over to a professional website design? A big part of web development is knowing professional graphic design to create a professional look, including graphic creation, image sizing and optimization.

What about security? Are you familiar with how important it is to protect your visitor? Let's say you're running free discussion forums on your website because it's "free and easy". Did you know you are putting your members and visitors at risk? Free discussion forums contain malicious spyware, harvesters and scripts that highjack user's browsers. In this day and age, security is a top priority when owning a website.

Website performance is the key element to having a successful web site. The content should be appealing to the human visitor who might choose to do business with you or for the search engine robot that decides if your website meets its criteria for inclusion. Search engines also change their algorithms and apply new filters so indexing methods are always evolving. Do you have the time that is required to keep up on search engine trends?

The AlphaGeek Web Design team offers many professional website options for all budgets and requirements. With an industry that changes constantly, ongoing education is a requirement to be successful and the team participates in seminars and webinars to stay on top of trends. Our goal is to help any business, no matter how large or small, find success online.