These days just about anyone can build a website and there are a lot of Riverview Website Designers who are available to build your website that probably shouldn’t be. We do a lot of Social Media and belong to various Facebook groups in Brandon, Riverview, Fishhawk and Apollo Beach. As an experience Web Developer with a real office, I cringe when I see BNI networking member recommend some of these inexperienced web designers.
It is not about competition, it is about ethics and honesty for us. We get AT LEAST 3 projects a WEEK where someone hired another Riverview or Brandon Web Designer to build them a site. They paid for what they thought was a custom WordPress Website. What they got was a template theme and a ton of rookie mistakes that really hurt their business and the money spent on the website was flushed down the drain. It is very sad and very real. Unless you know what to ask and what to look for, you can get burned. And you need to realize that your website is not just a website but it is your impression on the internet world.
I will give you an example. We have an acquaintance who is a Chiropractor in the Brandon Florida area. He is in BNI so he used the local BNI referral Website Designer. He paid a handsome price for a website. It looked good. After about 6 months, his business has not changed at all so he called Tampa Web Design to take a look. We took a look at his site. Immediately we noticed 4 things that were wrong on his homepage. We ran his site through our quality checklist that we have developed after building and monitoring thousands of websites in the past 22 years. The local “web developer” also did not install any backup or analytics as well as an abundance of other details we have on EVERY site we build. So, since it would not make a huge difference for 2 weeks, we installed Analytics and we asked him to make sure we could track phone calls and appoints for the next 2 weeks so we had a baseline.
At the end of 2 weeks, we knew his current traffic and a decent summary of his business. Then, we made 3 VERY SIMPLE design changes to his website. It literally took us about 30 minutes. Then we monitored his traffic and he monitored his business for the next 2 weeks. The results were much different than we expected. We knew from other customers how important these 3 elements were, but had no idea the business impact! After 2 weeks, he had a 18.5{4147d0392dd2dfd8c8fd8321fbb70a42e72e0609421aedc53c1218d444c7709c} INCREASE in phone calls for appointment availability PER DAY!!! But more importantly they got 14 ADDITIONAL APPOINTMENTS PER WEEK!!! That is $700 additional business a week. It is important to note that was not any difference in traffic.
Will a website from an experience web designer and developer have that much impact on your business. Who knows. This was a for an established business. They already had web traffic and people were searching for them. What we did was change the website to work for their business and add key elements that were missing.