Still using “cousin Bob” for your website design & development? Maybe the time has come to rethink your strategy

Small and even medium sized businesses have long relied on their relatives, friends and other semi tech savvy people to be their “website design agency.” And it worked just find for a number of years. But, as website design & development becomes ever more sophisticated and it has increasingly become hard to rank in the upper search echelons of Google, the capabilities the home based website design & development agency is no longer up to the task or building and designing a search optimized website that is compatible with tablets and phones and serves as a marketing hub for a company’s online and social media marketing objectives.

Even if a mom and pop web design agency has a highly skilled person, that person is not likely to be able to know everything you need to know, or have enough time in the day to get everything done that needs to be done when it comes to modern website design & development.  Take search engine optimization for example. At Kirk, we have more than 25 full time employees. Half of them spend their days, listing websites on search engine directories, writing and posting blogs, placing off page content on other sites and search optimizing websites. That’s what it stays to stay on the first page of Google for a few important keywords these days. Simply put, it is no longer a one-person job.

We also have a dozen fulltime website design & development people who work in several different languages required for modern website design & development. Because Flash doesn’t work on iPhones iPads, we have developers who work in HTML5. All developers at a website design agency should be capable of making your website viewable and compatible on tablets and cell phones. This is especially true of smaller companies where about 50 percent of web traffic is done through these devices.

Before you board up your business, take heart. It doesn’t necessarily have to cost an arm and a leg to hire a full-fledged website design agency.  While you will have probably have to spend more than you been paying your relative, you can take comfort in the knowledge that your website will be doing the work it was supposed to be doing all along—generating leads and making sales.