Cheap Web Design, Step Right Up!

By Tony Dodd | March 30, 2010

Using the internet is now mainstream; a way of life for the great many people who buy products and services online. In light of this, you might think more businesses would have a better online presence. So why don’t they?

Low budget = cheap website?

In my experience the top reason is budget. Businesses, usually those on the smaller side, tend to have limited financial resources to devote to web marketing. Now no one wants to settle on a poorly designed website, but some do because they think it’s all they can afford. Unfortunately a poorly designed website can often seem shady or unreliable to potential customers-which sort of defeats the purpose of a website: to draw customers in.

So enters the do-it-yourself website template. This kind of thing sounds good, in theory: it’s fast, cheap, and requires no special skills in web design, content development, information architecture, search engine optimization, or the rest of that “stuff.” As a business owner, you can’t lose, right?

With a decade of experience developing websites across many industries, I’ve seen the effects of both good and bad design. So I can say with confidence that your website, if done incorrectly, will most likely fail to achieve your goals, leaving you with a sense that websites don’t work.

The “template” website

I’ve noticed a recent push by these template companies to sell their product as a quick and easy website solution, but they’re selling you an incomplete package. Don’t get me wrong-these types of services can be useful, but only in the hands of a professional development team. That’s right, team. Web development is much more than just placing a Word document into an eye-popping web interface, and so it takes more than one person to do it well.

Web development takes the business as a package and gives it an online presence, so that everything your business is and does is represented as a whole. You could say it’s your “brick and mortar” for the web.

Website templates completely skip all strategic planning steps, and many feature poor navigation and content structure. Some may even look like a competing business. This can hurt your brand in three ways:

1. It forces you to modify your brand to fit a set “look” rather than designing that “look” to fit your brand
2. It means less thought goes into your site structure and content development, affecting user-friendliness
3. You have far less chance against competition, especially in search engine results

A better way?

If cost is the main issue when building a website, spreading that development cost out over a longer period of time may be a better option than a one time “cheap” solution. Let’s put it this way: would you go to the car dealership and ask to see the best Cadillac on the lot and only bring enough cash to buy a Yugo? Maybe you would, but you certainly wouldn’t be driving the Caddy off the lot.

Instead, maybe you’d purchase the base model Caddy knowing that you could upgrade the vehicle over time. The analogy ends here, though, because we all know cars don’t work that way.

But websites absolutely work that way, and this way of developing your website can  be more successful and  save you a costly redesign in the future.

Necessity of strategy

If the goal of your website is to make some kind of conversion, whether it’s product sales, subscriptions, downloads, etc., a strategy is essential. But the implementation of that strategy is an ongoing effort that does not end, and should never be thought of as a one-time purchase.

So even if a template purchase is your decision, having a good game plan for that website is still very important. Get a consultation with a reputable development company before executing any major decision, or you may end up missing the boat.

Have you ever gone the “cheap” route? How did it work out?

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Photos courtesy of ricardodiaz (left) and irinaslutsky (right)

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