Right off the bat, that needs a bit of defining since there are website hosts for local marketing that offer to create your website for free and toss in the first posts for your social media pages.
Those are not professional website developers. Those are cookie-cutter masters who change colors and photos but who have no clue what your business needs and goals are or have no interested in taking your business to the next level.
A professional website developer is a specialist in three things:
- SEO
- Developing with purpose
- Design that matches your brand
And, she/he specializes in matching your goals that will grow your business to each of those specialties.
SEO
SEO is all about the content that lands on every part of your site. Your content must be originally written (no copy and paste from someone else’s site); have a unique personality (that means that you are talking to just one person as if they are your best friend not a lecture or a bunch of statistics); and include pictures, charts, graphs, infographics, videos (even if embedded from YouTube) and all should be loosely relevant to your business in some way.
Dev with Purpose
The purpose is to direct all the content toward keeping visitors on your website for at least 15 minutes (the average visitor that drops by gives you 15-seconds before they leave!) and that is so illuminating in some way – entertaining, educational, interesting, graphic or personal – that these visitors return and return often.
Design that Matches Your Brand
This includes the colors chosen, the images that greet your visitor immediately, ease in navigating and locating specific information without having to “hunt it down” and the words that fill your content.
Can You Do It Yourself?
Absolutely!
IF you do your homework and learn how to write website, blog, infographic and eBook content as well as … forget it. Unless you are already well-versed in marketing in the virtual environment, to actually have a website that is able to compete for visitor’s attention, just spend the money and outsource as much as you can.
