What Type of Website is Right For Your Business?
It is 2022 and having a website for your business isn’t just a necessity, it’s standard practice.
Unfortunately though, it’s not always standard for a company to have a website that’s fit for purpose, so we’re here to help make the right choice when it comes to your website platform, design and functionality.
Your website is the virtual front door for your business, where you’ll greet new audiences, pique the interest of unsuspecting passersbys, and ultimately invite them into becoming loyal customers. But building a powerful website for your business can be confusing with so many options on the market.
Here’s what you need to know about building a website that is right for your business.
What Type of Website is Right For Your Business?
Choosing the right website for your business comes down to a number of factors:
Your budget
Your business needs and priorities
Your familiarity with SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Your experience with design
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at these 4 areas in order to help you make the best choice for your business. For the sake of simplifying the process, we’ll be focusing on the 3 biggest web builders on the market - WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix.
Evaluating Your Budget for Your Website
The first step in building a professional website for your business is to determine your budget.
Like with anything in life, you get the best results when you work with a professional. Your web designer and developer will know exactly what to do to maximise your budget and fulfill your business’ needs in terms of functionality, SEO, design, and so much more, allowing you to capture and convert new clients with ease
Our Lustic Media web team works with a variety of budgets to design and develop a website that suits your needs - be that from the most budget-friendly templated web designs to fully coded, custom websites. There are options for all businesses and we can guide you through them.
However, as entrepreneurs, we understand you might really want to try and do it yourself. So in the spirit of sharing our knowledge, there are a few things you need to keep in mind before getting started.
First, you will still need to allot a budget for non-negotiables like hosting, domain registration, and a web-building platform.
Second, you need to consider your goals, timeline, and if you’ll be able to achieve those goals by building your website yourself.
Unfortunately, having a website that acts as just a placeholder without any systems and functionality to attract your audience, gain their trust, and ultimately convert them into a loyal customer will be a waste of money and time - even if you’re saving a few dollars by building it yourself.
Choosing The Right Platform For Your Business Needs
Whether you hire a professional or decide to build it on your own, the first step in creating a professional website will require you to decide which platform to work with. The most common choices we see are WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix so we’ll review each.
Wix
If there’s only one thing you take away from this blog post, it is don’t use Wix.
We find many newcomers get lured in by Wix’s easy design and templated options but there are so many hidden issues with using Wix to build your website. Here are just a few:
Wix websites often rank poorly on Google because they are not SEO compatible. Wix designs websites like a brochure, which looks attractive but doesn’t function like a website. When you (or your future web team) look to upgrade your website, you will not be able to migrate the data or hosting to a better platform and you’ll spend more money starting from scratch. In short, just don’t.
Squarespace vs WordPress
Every business website has a different set of needs and priorities and these two web-building platforms are both useful for different reasons. Here’s our summary on both:
Squarespace is a great all-in-one platform. It is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and offers some really stylish templates that work well across mobile and desktop. Squarespace optimises SEO so you don’t have to really focus on it (although there’s an argument you should) and the hosting is included, making it a great one-stop-shop web builder. For the more experienced, Squarespace does limit design and development capabilities and not all web developers will work with it if you’d like advanced features in the future. Luckily we can and we do.
WordPress is generally accepted as an industry leader in web builders. It is a little more complex on the back end, but with this comes better results in the long run. WordPress is great for SEO, it’s fully customisable, developer compatible, mobile responsive and adaptable on all fronts, making it often the most popular choice with web developers. Web hosting is not included within the platform so that is something you’ll need to factor in when purchasing a domain.
When choosing the best platform for your business, it’s best to assess your business needs and priorities today and for the future.
If you’re a photographer, you might not need anything more than an elegant gallery to display your portfolio, a page for press and media features and a simple contact form. Squarespace would be a great starting point for a business like this, but you’ll want this to be set up in a way that will allow your business to expand in the future, should you wish to sell your prints online for example.
If your business already requires a website with more functionality such as online booking and advanced eCommerce capabilities, you’re going to need a web builder that can easily support those needs.
When it comes to building a website that has more functionality, your web builder will give you several options through apps and plug-ins. Squarespace provides a selection of apps to help you build out contact forms, check-out links, payment processing, and eCommerce options. But WordPress is the clear winner as it provides you with a more robust selection of plug-ins, so you’ll have several options to choose from with each function you’d like to have on your website.
As alluded to earlier, WordPress is also a notoriously difficult platform for inexperienced web builders to tackle on their own. So if you want to avoid unnecessary spending on switching from a platform like Wix to WordPress later down the road, hiring a professional to get things up and running will ultimately save you more money in the long run.
How Familiar Are You with SEO?
SEO isn’t just an internet buzzword - it is crucial to your website being found and getting seen by the right people. SEO is the reason why results pop up when you type a question into Google.
For example, if you own a boutique hotel in the Bahamas, you’ll most likely want to rank as one of the top results on Google when someone searches “boutique hotels in the Bahamas” or “best places to stay in the Bahamas”.
Whether you’re a pro or a beginner at SEO, WordPress offers a variety of SEO tools and plug-ins that can really guide you along the way in terms of writing keyword-rich content that ranks on Google.
Our team of web developers and copywriting experts are skilled in writing SEO-rich content so you don’t have to spend countless hours learning about SEO techniques (or pay a separate agency for these services).
What Are Your Design Needs (and How Comfortable Are You With Them)?
Nothing gives off a bad impression like heading to a business’s website and feeling like you’ve been thrown back to the 90s. It is 2022 and the general public has come to expect a higher level of curation, design, and branding when it comes to websites.
Creating a website on your own seems like a great (and affordable) idea until you start designing it without any prior experience. Thankfully, almost all platforms offer free templates to choose from as a starting point (but we don’t think you should end there).
The problem with a free pre-designed template is that you won’t have much control over the customization of it. Meaning you might lose potential customers because your website just doesn’t have the design to support a specific function. There’s also a high chance that another business has the same exact template, which doesn’t help you when it comes to building awareness for your brand.
On the upside, you can always purchase a pre-designed template from a web designer for either Squarespace or WordPress to give you some uniqueness without blowing the design budget.
While this might give you a little bit more control over your web design, finding a template that meets all your business needs can be difficult.
Since templates are designed to help a wide range of people, the functionality and flow of a template will be a little more generic than a completely customized design specific to your business's unique needs.
If you’d like to find a common ground between a pre-designed template and something that’s a little more customized to your business, we can work with pre-designed templates so that you can add a little more personalization to your web’s design and functionality.
Bonus: Ease of Use
Designing a website is a huge project to undertake. And if you’re taking it on all by yourself, the biggest deciding factor for what type of website is right for your business will ultimately depend on how easy each platform is to use.
In this regard, Squarespace is the easy winner. Not only is it incredibly user-friendly, but it also provides you with beautiful themes with drag-and-drop options for galleries, call-to-action-buttons, and other functionality features.
However, it is worth noting that by hiring a professional to design your website, you’ll reduce the time you need to spend on managing and fixing any bumps or mishaps that are likely to occur.
DIY Your Website vs. Hiring a Professional
There are pros and cons to both building your own website versus hiring a professional and we hope we’ve shed some light on both options. Ultimately the DIY route has considerably more cons. Although the biggest downside with hiring a professional would be the initial hiring cost, it’ll ensure that your website is properly built, functioning and optimized, getting seen by potential clients, and converting site traffic into paying customers.
Aside from ensuring that your entire website is fully functional and ready to capture and convert your leads, a professional will also save a lot of time on the actual building process. Most importantly a professional will troubleshoot any technical issues and avoid amateur mistakes that would otherwise be costly.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
These factors will help you identify the right website platform to use. The Lustic Media expert advice is you can’t go wrong with either a self-hosted WordPress or Squarespace site.
In our opinion, it is best to have a professional build your website to get you started off on the right foot. That way you won’t have to worry about meeting technical and design standards and maintenance/general upkeep won’t take months to fix.
If you have any questions about building a website that is a perfect fit for your business, feel free to drop a comment below. Or if you’d like to hear how Lustic Media can take over this daunting task of building your dream website, feel free to schedule a call with us and let us formulate the best web development strategy for you and your business.