For a very long time, digital was considered a poor cousin to the more traditional marketing avenues. It was something that was nice to have and which, all too often, was a project, done as a favour, by a friend or a relative who had studied web design and coding at college. It was always done with the best intentions, but it soon became apparent that this was not the best way to operate. Because in the space of the last decade, digital and the internet has gone from being a marginalized function to a key element for most businesses. The world is increasingly turning digital. Marketing spend in this realm is now enormous and for most businesses, it is the internet that is the means by which new clients discover them. Building a site, yourself is simply no longer the way to go and here is why.
Plan ahead
The goal of any website is to be viewed and used. In other words, if you build a website then you want traffic. And traffic means that you need server capacity and a good hosting solution. Sure, if you are running a blog that will be viewed by a handful of people a week then this is not going to be an area of major concern for you. But if traffic is your lifeblood and if you intend to try and drive users to the site then you need a winning solution, and this is something that requires a specialist. The last thing that you want is for your site to fall over as soon as you start to ramp the traffic numbers.
Driving traffic
How do you intend to get people to your website? This is an important question to ask and answer. And it is almost guaranteed that the answer will be a complicated, multi-faceted one. In short, you are going to need to ensure that your site is optimised for search and for this to happen it needs to be built by an expert. What happens in the background with the metadata and the site structure is as important as what happens on the front end when it comes to making your site a winner with Google. This is not a skill that can be acquired by reading a book, it is complicated stuff that needs an expert to work on it. The more organically discoverable you are the more you will flourish.
You need a team
Never end up with a situation where you have outsourced the build of your site to a one-man outfit. Especially if they build you a bespoke solution. Perhaps this is okay if you have a WordPress site, but if not then you need to be working with a team of people. When it comes to putting in place a service level agreement then it goes without saying that a single person’s operation is never going to be able to respond in time to an emergency – they simply cannot be available throughout the day and night. So, find a reliable partner company that is properly resourced and sufficiently experienced with experts in fields of design, coding, SEO and technical support. Once you have found this partner then you are onto a winning path.
