In the old days you could hire a website design and development person who knew a couple of coding languages, throw up a site and you were in business. As the web grew more sophisticated you hired a web design agency to update or redesign your site.
But hire a typical website design and development company or a web design agency and you could be cutting yourself off from a lot of what the web can do for your business.
First, about 40 percent of web users are viewing the web on mobile devices. That means to reach those potential customers, you need a website that is enabled for mobile devices. A dedicate mobile site is even better if you own a restaurant or retail store. While there are website design and development companies that can do this, check first before you hire one.
Second, companies with a sales force or a dozen or more employees are increasingly doing more and more in the cloud and online. To do this right, you must integrate the web, smart phones and mobile devices to integrate with each other; from databases, to sales apps, to storage and everything in between. That means you’ll need application developers to get all the devices talking to each other. That’s something you’re unlikely to find at a web design agency.
Third, most website design and development companies claim to have search engine optimization capabilities. The truth is, they rarely have the capabilities. As Google has become more sophisticated, search engine optimization has become much more sophisticated. Off page linking must be done very carefully to get the benefits for SEO. Do it wrong and you can end up being punished by Google in the rankings or even delisted all together. The truth, is most website design and development companies will make sure the backend of your site is optimized, they guess at some keyword phrases to use in your content and they’ll create a blog to salt with keywords. If they don’t have the people to create relevant content that’s linked off page, getting your site onto the first couple pages of Google with keyword phrases that will move your business will be a very long and very slow process.
