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Your website probably doesn’t need to be redesigned

A professional website design should be effective for years to come. Depending on your niche, it’s usually recommended to redesign your website every couple of years to maintain an up to date image, but not more frequently than that. The only time you should make sweeping changes to the design of your website is when you feel that it doesn’t convey the image that you want for your company. But remember, you will tire of it long before your customers do.

You don’t have to pay every time you want to make a change

Even if all of the content on your website is accurate today, it will probably change at some time in the future. Almost every business owner has found themselves in this position at some point in time They’ve had to wait for an opening in their web designers schedule and then pay a fee before the changes could be made. This can be frustrating and sometimes costly, but it can be avoided with a content management system which enables you to easily make changes on your own. This gives you complete control over your content, it doesn’t cost you anything to make changes and you can make them whenever you want.

Web hosting is cheap

I’ve talked to lots of clients who were charged well over $100/month for web hosting – and we’re not talking about a dedicated server. These people were being charged 10 times what they should have been charged by a web designer who was simply looking to fatten their own wallets. These days, you can find reputable and reliable hosting companies for under $10/month. This usually includes unlimited traffic, bandwidth and email accounts and will more than adequate for most companies.

Website design does not equal SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is probably one of the most misunderstood fields of marketing ever. In the most basic terms possible, SEO is a combination of quality content, clean code and inbound links. Without the proper application of all three, you won’t achieve significant ranking in even a moderately competitive industry. The optimized code can only take you so far without quality content and inbound links. Any designer who assures you that their web design is all you need is trying to sell you a nice shiny bottle of snake oil.

You are not always right

The job of a web designer, aside from the obvious task of designing your website, is to provide their guidance and expertise. If they blindly agree with everything you say to do, they really aren’t giving you the best service possible. Your designer should be able to offer recommendations and explain their logic, but at the end of the day, the final decision is in your hands. I’ve worked with a few clients who insisted on doing things their own way even after we’ve advised them why a different approach would be more effective, but since they write the check, they get what they want. More often than not, however, they usually follow our recommendations when their idea didn’t work the way they had hoped.