Don’t design your own website. Seriously. It will look terrible.
Perhaps you think that WordPress.org or Wix are easy to use, so you can have a crack at designing a website for your business or organisation. Please don’t. It really will suck.
We’ve seen it repeatedly. You think you’ll save the expense by doing it yourself. Maybe you even think the outcome isn’t so bad. You’re so wrong. Stick to what you know – whether that’s massage, coaching, insurance or music.
How much time have you got?
In my spare time, I play the trombone. I perform in a number of orchestras in and around the London area. I don’t like to admit it, but I’ve been doing it for over 35 years and I’m pretty good at it. I’m not in the LSO, though. Despite playing the trombone for years, I’ve not had the confidence to put my livelihood on the line and risk everything by taking an audition and playing professionally, so that taking the instrument out of the case becomes a necessity to pay the bills.
“What has this got to do with web design?” I hear you ask. Well, let me ask you this:
- How many hours do you need to drive a car before you’re ready to take part in a motor race?
- How many times do you need to ride a bike before you can win a Grand Tour?
- How much practice do you have to do on a trombone before you can win a professional audition on it?
A lot. A helluva lot and then some. According to Seth Godin, at least 10,000 hours if you want to be among the best.
Practice is like money in the bank
Something the great Denis Wick, LSO ex-principal trombone with a 30-year tenure, said at a masterclass I once attended is “Practice is like money in the bank”, meaning, of course, that the more time you put into getting better at something, the more dividends you will reap.
Here’s the thing: web design is like any other skill. It takes a very long time to master and loads of practice before you become good enough – good enough to actually do something people will pay money for. Even if you have a talent for it, as with a musical instrument, success is 10% talent and 90% hard work. It will take dozens of sites, if not hundreds, before you can strut your stuff and show off what you can do. Are you ready to give up what you’ve chosen as your profession and spend all those hours on website design and development?
Leave it to the experts
I won prizes in local music competitions when I was a kid. Really. I even got to stand up and play solos. But I realised pretty quickly that if you want to be of that calibre, you better be damn good at it to stand up in front of an audience. Now I’m happy to sit at the back of an orchestra, be a team player and not lust after the limelight. Why? Simple. There are others that can do it much better, which I learned when I thought I could win a national brass competition and came nowhere near. I realised there are people that can do the whole standing up and playing solos thing much better. So I focus on the stuff I’m really good at and sit at the back of the orchestra in a supporting role.
The same is true with web design. If you think you can do it yourself, you are bound to be missing quite a few tricks of the trade. There’s always going to be someone who can do it better, faster and easier because that’s what they’re good at, which is why they do it professionally.
Let me put it this way: if your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic. If you pipe springs a leak, you call a plumber. Yet for some bizarre reason too many people think they can design their own website.
What is it really going to cost?
Make no mistake about it. Your website is your Number 1 marketing tool. Don’t ruin it by designing it yourself and don’t hire the cheapest around – or your cousin. It will suck. The entire experience, from beginning to end. You won’t know what to do when you come unstuck (and you will because nothing ever goes according to plan) and risk damaging your brand image, not to mention human relationships, through a misguided attempt to save cash. The true cost cannot be measured purely in monetary terms.
You say you can’t afford it? It’s a matter of priorities. You’ll always find a way to pay for things that are truly important to you. Besides, what’s it going to cost if you mess things up? That nice cousin or nephew might not be your best bet after all.
Good design sells
We live in an era of design. You don’t have to look far to know why. Like it or not, just see how Apple has set the gold standard of smartphone, tablet, and laptop design. Good design sells, bad design doesn’t. There’s plenty of research now that suggests people trust beautifully designed websites more. To be honest, people trust beautifully designed anything and everything more. We like beautiful cars, houses, and clothes. Exactly the same goes for websites.
If you build your own website, unless you know what you’re doing, it will not be beautiful and it will hurt your business.
I come across websites offering something I (or my clients) might need, but the website is just so badly designed that I simply cannot take them seriously, so I look elsewhere. Don’t you?
Don’t become the next statistic
Recently, the most spectacular design failure happened to Marks & Spencer in 2014. A major website redesign, which cost £150m, resulted in an 8% decrease in online revenue, thousands of annoyed customers, and very likely several people losing their jobs.
Undoubtedly there will be another big brand to reveal a major website redesign failure – possibly even in 2016. One will be coming soon, I’m pretty sure. Whatever you do, don’t let your website design become the next statistic.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
