Where Can I Get a Website Design?

Pawleys Island website designers Lucidpage, Inc. are the sponsors of this article.

If you are looking for a website design, there are many great sources and resources available. Before you decide on one, you have some basic design decisions to make regarding your business website. The first of those is, do you want to design your own website, or pay a professional website designer to do it for you?

The second question, which is just as important, is what exactly are you expecting your business website to do? What I mean is this:

• Do you want it to be a 24/7 silent salesperson?
• Do you want to take orders online?
• Do you want to book appointments online?
• Do you want your site design to inspire and motivate people?
• Do you want your web site’s pages to inform and educate?
• Do you want people to call you or email you?
• Do you need a website that ranks highly in the search engines?

These are just a start. Thinking through everything you want your business website to accomplish will help you make some crucial design decisions before you start to figure out where to get your design or template, or whether to hire a professional website designer. The more you expect of your site pages, the greater the probability that you will want to hire a pro.

Templates and page builders, in the hands of amateurs, can accomplish only so much. Sure, you might get a website that’s visually appealing, but it may well fail when it comes to the marketing and sales end, or when it comes to search engine optimization. You can have the best looking website in town, but if your ideal customers and clients just visit, and then bounce away without ever contacting you, it’s doing you no good.

This is a case where you might decide to find your perfect site design by hiring a professional website designer, one who also has marketing skills and experience, and perhaps even direct response advertising know-how.

On the other hand, yours might be a very simple business, and all you need is a simple, one-page website that tells customers what you do and where to find you. In that case a templatized site design could work for you, and save you some money in the process.

Or, you might have some of the relevant marketing, sales and advertising experience mentioned above, in which case you could use a template and customize it, using the skills you already possess.

Of course, the other consideration is time. If you are a busy entrepreneur, you may not have the time to mess around designing your own business website. Even if you do technically have the time, it may not be the best way you could spend those hours. After all, you are an expert at whatever your business is, not an expert web design person. Maybe best to leave the job to a professional in that case.

These and other considerations all come into play in the all-important decision of where to find a website design. The last one is a simple bit of advice.

Before you start your design, or even begin to work with a web design company, do a lot of looking around at other business websites. Look at sites of companies similar to your own, and at sites in completely non-related fields. Learn what you like and don’t like, learn what’s visually pleasing and what isn’t, and learn what works and what doesn’t.

Then, you will be best prepared to make all of these website design decisions, before you spend your hard-earned money.