One of the quickest responses we get when we ask people why they built a website by themselves is "I wanted to say money and web developers are expensive." We won't sit here and tell you that's untrue, but more and more digital marketing agencies are offering web design for very reasonable prices. In terms of the argument, we do have some rebuttals. 1) Yes, you you will save money, but how many hours did you or your team have to slave over the site you built? 2) Is the site going to perform well and earn you money in the long run? And 3) Your website is the first impression you leave on many people, so don't you want it to be as great as possible? As a business owner, you will always be looking for ways to cut costs and we understand that completely. However, with something as essential as a website, you want to put your best foot forward. The goal of a website is to attract new customers to your business. Typically, your site aims to make sales or generate leads. If you have a less-than-stellar site because you built it yourself without the proper knowledge behind design, you may not make those sales or collect any leads. In contrast, professionally-built websites will be designed based on what the experts know works to get consumers' attention. Yes, you will have to pay more upfront, but you'll make it all back when the results start to flow in! Find a digital marketing agency that offers reasonable web development packages to avoid paying $1000s like you will with some web specialists while still getting a new site that will help you reach and exceed your goals.

One of the best things you can do for your website is optimize it. There are several different layers to optimization to consider, many of which are challenging to accomplish if you aren't familiar with web design.

• SEO Optimization: SEO is Search Engine Optimization. SEO Optimization involves making sure that every page on your website includes keywords relevant to your business, proper headings, page descriptions, and more. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to site SEO, and it's a skill acquired over a period of time. Many site builders give you SEO settings or something similar, but if you don't know what to look for, how can you be sure the SEO is truly optimized? Depending on the team you work with, there may be a person whose entire job it is to check SEO on client websites. Having your pages SEO optimized will help your site rank higher on Google when someone searches for a relevant keyword. SEO is a long-term game that gets better over time and you don't need to put any money behind it like you do for Google Ads!
• Mobile Optimization: Mobile traffic accounts for roughly half of all web traffic worldwide. With stats like that, it's very clear that your website needs to be useable on phones. This type of optimization is particularly tricky on many website builders because changing the size or padding on one device will affect it on the others as well. In many cases, you'll need proper coding to make a truly mobile-optimized site. Backgrounds and other visuals need to size down correctly, text needs to be laid out properly, and everything needs to be readable at the smaller mobile size. Digital marketing agencies and other web designers can make the transition from desktop to mobile view seamless to ensure that no matter how people view your site, they're getting the best possible user experience.
• Browser Optimization: The sad reality is that not everyone uses the same browser. As such, you want to make sure that your website is compatible to all the browsers you can think of. Google Chrome is a must have as well as Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Some widgets or elements may not be supported by all browsers, and occasionally pre-made templates will not translate well from one to the next. It's up to your digital marketing agency or web designer to make your site look and perform wonderfully on any and all browsers it comes across. Trust us - even the best developer can get a headache trying to make sites compatible across browsers!
• Loading Optimization: Lastly, you need to focus on loading optimization. Essentially, you need to be sure that your site loads up quickly. In today's age, people expect a site to load in no more than 2 seconds! In order to make that happen, you need to know how to balance the visuals and files you embed into the pages. Website builders have tips and tricks to shorten load time that you may not be aware of if you build a site by yourself. Two seconds is a very short window to get everything up and running, so leave it to the pros whenever possible.

Lastly, as we briefly touched on before, web designers and digital marketing agencies can offer custom content on your site that a website builder never could. Anything involving complex code with multiple levels of logic will more than likely require a professional to accomplish. Things like animations, difficult integrations, popups, event-based actions, and more can all fall under the custom category. Following 2020, the digital realm is more saturated than ever, so you want your website to stand out. Custom widgets and elements are a great way to do that and make the site memorable. These bells and whistles are particularly important if you want to sell yourself as tech-savvy, modern, innovative, or groundbreaking. It's not hard to convince visitors that you are any and all of those things when they click into a custom page that has lines upon lines of code involved. Of course, if you want to feature custom content on your website, you should be willing to invest a bit more into it. Custom sites can take weeks or months to build from scratch, and each team member will spend hours coding for you. It's only fair that custom sites cost a bit more. As we said in Reason #1 however, you can expect a huge return on investment. The nicer the website the more traction it will get. More visits = more customers = more profit!