How does investing in a new website add value to your business?

Websites are now the foundation of everything a business does online to promote itself. They communicate your purpose, vision, products, services and the outcome to your customers/clients. But what if they are doing a bad job? You could find that investing in a new one adds tremendous value to your business.

What problems does my business face if it has a website that doesn't look modern and professional?

Most of our marketing efforts online involve us trying to drive people back to our website to look at what we are offering.  Most digital marketing is very expensive and like us you probably don't want to waste much money getting it right!

A poor website design means you will lose credibility, casting doubt in the mind of your users.  Your website needs to be a highly professional looking online presence for your business.

Imagine spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on  marketing for the website, only to fail to convince users. It's like a runner who has trained hard, spending time getting in shape and making sure he is fast, only to fall at the last hurdle. 

We all sometimes spend money that doesn't deliver a decent Return on Investment (ROI) and it's painful.  We've all been there, it's frustrating and eats into your profits.  With a poor looking website, that pain is really multiplied,  with lack of sales, negative feedback from staff and users and a bad impact on the brand you are trying to promote.

A poor website can lead to security issues and lasting damage to your reputation

If your competitors have a better web presence, potential customers will go with them instead.  In good times when you should be harvesting the market for new business, your competitors will be growing instead of you.

What's more, with a good website that helps users get in touch and buy from them, your competitors will get a better return on investment for any marketing they are undertaking.

Technical problems (often associated with old websites) could be fatal.  There seemingly small things that will heavily impact your SEO potential or get you penalised, making your site disappear from Google's search results.

Poor website security can be devastating.  Hackers are always looking to take down sites and malicious bots and code look for older versions of typical website software such as Wordpress, Concrete5 and Drupal in order to expliot vulnerabilites.   This can lead to the website hosting company taking the site down, it's like cutting off a limb to save the entire body.  They don't want their servers infected, it could spread or damage the reputation of the servers' IP adress. 

Google will also down-rank or block websites that have been identified to contain malware and users anti-virus software will also block such sites to avoid the treat spreading to the website visitors computer or device.

The damage caused by being ranked down on Google and losing market-share to competitors can take time to fix and in some cases need a specialist cyber security expert to analyse and fix, making the original cost of the website look tiny in comparison.

How to investing in a new website for total peace-of-mind

It's clear that you need a professional web design company to properly plan, design, build and maintain a website to support your company, just like you need a professional mechanic to maintain your car.

Here are some tips for choosing the right web design company to work with...

• Ensure the web design company has a good reputation with trust signals such as phone number, active social media presence and good client reviews.
• Ask questions to make sure they understand your business and what you want to achieve from the new website.
• Check their portfolio to see the range of clients they have and compare those with their client reviews.
• Make sure there is a support package to keep the site running smoothly in the future and so you know what the cost of keeping it maintained is going to be.
• The right web design company will leave you worry free knowing that you have a professional extension of your team to call if you need to ask anything.

The result of choosing the right company to work with will be a website that is designed and built to be mobile friendly, helps by promoting your brand, unique to your business (not a typical template) and communicates why website users will want to buy from you.

The website will also have trust signals such as awards, accreditations and reviews, to help reassure visitors that they want to do business with you.  Rather than selling products and services, a great website will promote the positive outcome of buying those services.

The aim is also longievity - an up to date, well-designed website that will last you many years with only minor updates and any new functionality you want to add.

Case Study:  The outcome of investing in a professionally designed website

Below we have a client testimonial that we recieved who have recently benefitted from the launch of their new website courtesy of our web design agency.  This is for a local charity who had identified that it was time for a new website...

How does this testimonial show the value in our work designing and building their new website?

1. The client says we worked for a "great price" - the client is happy they can afford it and it offered good value for money
    
2. "Listened to requirements" and "completed in good time" - so we hit the mark, helping them achieve what they wanted and things were done within a good timescale, so presumably it fits with other marketing activities our client has planned
    
3. "We are very pleased with the result and we have received many more enquiries from the website than previously" - So they got what they wanted from their investment and they are already receiving more enquires.
   That's awesome! This really shows the value of a professional design and a website built right because we haven't undertaken any extra marketing for this client, yet they are receiving more enquiries. So those enquiries are coming from the improvements to the website itself.
    
4. "Made Simple Media also made it very simple for us to edit pages as we require and were very helpful in providing guidance for us to do this ourselves" - In other words, they can easily update the site themselves. This means they don't have to pay us to do it and are saving time and money on their end because it is so easy. We provide generic user guides free to charge too so the client can easily jog their memory when they come back to it after a break
    

It may seem on the surface that it is easier with SEO and Ads etc. to say to people "this is what you spend", "this is the traffic you can expect" and based on your conversion rate you can expect X leads.  But as you can see here, great web design adds great valuet to your business. We don't presume to be the cheapest and we're certainly not the most expensive, but we will work hard to deliver you great value every time!

Conclusion

As we have seen here, web design services are key for most companies online presence due to the importance of an up to date website to avoid the critical pitfalls of not investing in a professional website for your business.

It's best to get this done as soon as possible, then you can relax knowing the website is doing it's job and focus on running your business and effective marketing to help sell your products or services.