Do Good Design

I confess, it always annoys me when someone who’s starting a business says “Oh, I’ll just do my own website.” As if, gee, it can’t be that hard so I’ll learn how to do it and save myself the money!

Or I hear complaint after complaint that “I’m just not getting the sales I need and don’t know why,” and I go to their website and it’s a disaster.

But then I realized, most people don’t know that while anyone can do web design, it takes a lot of skill to be good at it.

What people say is that “I don’t have enough money to get a professional website.”

What they mean is “It’s not worth it to me because I don’t see the value.”

So I thought rather than list the plethora of skills that it takes to be a good web designer, which would be very boring and no one would read, I’d write an article: Should I hire a web designer or do it myself?

You’ll be thinking this is just self-serving marketing stuff, but I do think it’s a really important question and one I can shed some light on, both as a designer and as someone who agonized over whether to hire a marketing consultant (I did, and it was worth it. More on that another time.)

I talk about whether to hire one (not always) and two of the most common problems websites have that keep them from getting good sales and customers: no website strategy and bad “usability”, or having a website people find hard to use.

I genuinely hope that people find it helpful, but I for one feel better for writing it!

Check it out and let me know what you think.