Delivered on time! Am I really back to a regular blogging schedule? Only time will tell…
Previously on…
In the last three blog posts, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, we talked about why your website should be built with a very specific purpose in mind other than just providing information on your company. Whether it’s selling products, getting leads, enhancing operations, improving customer service, or other specific purposes, building a website that sets out to do something very specific improves the results of the website and treats it for what it is: another resource. We also looked at some concrete examples of how you might implement that.
In this post, we’re going to talk about who to hire to help you to build your purposeful website.
The Elephant in the Room
Obviously, you might think that there’s a conflict of interest for me, a web developer, to talk about the kind of person that you should hire to build your website. I mean the rest of this blog post could just be about how you should hire me and that would be the end of things. But that’s not really where I am going with this. I mean, do I want you to hire me? Sure, I do. But I also want to talk about the kind of qualities that you are looking for in a web designer to be able to achieve building a purposeful website.
Building it Yourself
Yes, there are tools out there like SquareSpace that make it easier (I won’t say easy because even with such tools, building a website isn’t easy) to build a website yourself. And while this might work for personal blogs, newly-created tiny non-profits, or clubs and organizations, building your own website doesn’t work from a business point of view. Why? Because of the time it would take to build your own website. It would be too costly.
I know what you’re saying: there’s barely any cost because I’m building the website. Sure, I have to pay for a domain, hosting, and maybe any other licensing but that’s my only out-of-pocket expense. Nope. Your time is money. You’re spending time, talent, and energy that you could be selling something, building customer lists, running social media campaigns, and generally applying to your business to instead build your own website.
But I’ll save this topic for another blog post.
Qualities of a Web Designer For a Purposeful Website
A web designer is a web designer is a web designer is like saying a plumber is a plumber is a plumber. Web designers like all skills professions, come with a toolset that they’ve built over the years. Sometimes those toolsets are amazing design skills, great copywriting, creative out-of-the-box thinking, exceptional problem solving, strong web development, background in automation technology to connect the website to, and other strengths. Rarely does one designer follow the same path as another and they pick up all kinds of different skills and tools along the way.
For what you want to do, build a purposeful website, you need a web designer who can combine good design with functionality. They need to either have a strong background in marketing or be working with someone (from your camp) who can give them the marketing actions and content to build into the website to deliver the desired results. They need to build out the content, structure, and functionality like forms, buttons, calls to action, and other places where users can act upon the desired goals.
They can’t be just good at designing and building a cool-looking website. They can’t just be great at copywriting and build a website that’s a wall of text. They can’t just build an intuitive and interactive website that doesn’t say anything. They have to build something that’s all three things together. They have to be able to break down the website into steps and build out the structure that gets people from Point A to Point Z.
When you’re looking for that person to help you build a purposeful website, you need to find a web designer who will put in the hard work before even starting a mockup to ensure that all the goals are defined and agreed upon and that the functionality can be built to achieve them.
Up Next in this Series
Up next were going to look at tools and partners that you might employ to further deliver on your new-found purpose.
In the meantime, take a few minutes to reflect on whether you have a web designer/developer contact and, if you do, do they meet the needs of your business.
If any of this intrigues you and you want to hear more about how this connects to your business, you can drop me a line through my contact form or you can set up a time to talk to me: https://cwtwebsites.zohobookings.com/#/customer/4321453000000026017