Everyone knows that when trying to win over someone for the first time, you don't want to go cheap; McDonald's isn't a good first dinner date.
You want to make a good first impression to your potential partner with a nice meal at a fancy restaurant. The same is true for your organization's website.
You could use a free website builder, but you get what you pay for; and with a free website builder or a low cost website builder, more often than not, what you get is disappointing results and next to no visibility online.
#5. A Website Doesn't Do Any Good if No One Can Find It
So you use a free website builder to make your business's website. Now what? How will people get to your website to contact you for services or buy your products?
Today, word-of-mouth will only get you so far. About 8 in 10 people look online before making a purchasing decision. 81% of people do online research before buying, according to AdWeek. Telling family, friends, business associates and sharing your website link to Facebook just isn't enough to get your website to stand out among the hundreds, if not thousands, of companies offering the same thing you do online.
When you use a free website builder, your site isn't being built to be easily found on search engines. Many free website builders claim that their sites are, in fact, built to be found on search engines, but they get away with this claim by providing the most basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) possible as part of the website build, essentially not explicitly hurting your chances of being found on search engines, but not doing much of anything to help either.
The alternative: Anyone can use a free website builder and throw a website up online. But being able to actually produce any results from that website and getting people to actually find your website requires a team of multi-disciplined professionals on your side.
In order for your website to not sit in obscurity, untouched by most of your potential audience, you'll need a web design agency that includes SEO professionals, web designers, web developers and other Internet Marketing professionals to build your website with an SEO-friendly site structure, empowering your website to achieve valuable, high positions on search engines when people are searching for what you offer.
#4. A Free Website Builder Isn't Made For Lead Generation
Imagine a potential client lands on your law firm's website and needs your legal representation after they've been injured in a car accident. They may be interested in hiring your law firm, but how do they actually go about reaching you to schedule an initial consultation?
While it may seem obvious that the potential should contact your business, you may be surprised how many free website builders fail at making this as easy as possible for interested potentials.
The alternative: When using a free website builder, you miss opportunities to optimize your website for lead generation that would otherwise be there if you build your website with a professional web design agency.
Over years of using the internet, people are now used to finding certain important information, like contact information or a phone number, in particular positions within a website's layout. Web design professionals understand the ideal placement and presentation for prompts that inspire potentials to contact your business or buy from your business. It's important for an organization's website to be designed with the user experience in mind, guiding the potential through their purchasing decision in a way that makes working with your business the obvious logical conclusion.
Without professional guidance for your organization's website design, your website will likely struggle to attract leads from new customers or clients.
Talk to a Web Design Professional
#3. A Free Website Builder May Not Be Right for a Growing Business
If your business is growing, your website should too. You may offer certain services or sell certain products at the moment, but growing businesses often expand or change what they offer. Whether it's additional inventory, compliance changes, additional services, or even making blog posts about company news, even seemingly small updates can sometimes be much harder than they need to be when you use a free website builder.
Some free website builders only make website edits possible if you have knowledge of computer code languages, such as HTML, CSS and/or JavaScript.
While other free website builders don't need you to know code to make site updates, they can include frustrating content controls that sound intuitive, but once you log in and try to make changes, the intended look and feel of the website may break.
A drag and drop interface sounds nice, until you drag and drop a content block that doesn't clearly explain what it's used for, changing the layout of your site and creating clutter. You could delete what you just added, but sometimes the damage is already done, and it can be difficult for someone who isn't a professional web designer to get the intended look and feel back to where you want it. Put in some additional text in a free website builder, and that may unintentionally stretch out a part of the website design, which can break the intended look and functioning of a site.
The alternative: It's always best to get a professional web design for any organization's website. Professional web designers and web developers can analyze an organization's unique needs to ensure all the technical and aesthetic considerations are accounted for in order to accomplish what you want out of your website.
When you partner with a professional web design company, such as AC, your website will be built with a Content Management System (CMS). A professionally developed CMS is made to make site updates easy, while also preventing website updates from breaking the web design.
Talk to a Professional About Your Organization's Website
#2. A Free Website Builder Only Offers One-Size-Fits-All
You're not building a business's website, you're building your business's website. While there's plenty of free website builders that offer what seems like a wide variety of options to customize your website to fit your business, a free website builder is inherently a one-size-fits-all fix.
When you use a free website builder, you're limited to the options given to you for building your site. With a free website builder, you have a selection of choices to choose from for certain elements of your website design, then you modify these elements to fit your brand and business. But what if you wanted to display your multi-tier pricing in a certain way to encourage sales of a particular product? What if you didn't want to use the standard layout that the free website builder offers?
With a free website builder, you're using a cookie-cutter approach, resulting in your website looking a lot like everybody else's. But doing business means competing with other businesses, and standing out is the only way you'll be able to get noticed by potentials.
The alternative: Partnering with a professional web design firm allows you to create a custom web design that's designed for achieving the unique goals of your business.
#1. A Free Website Builder Can Create Lost Potential Customers or Clients
We've all experienced trying but failing to find something we're looking for -- car keys, the remote control, our phone (often, it turns up right next to you). But when we're thinking about buying a product or service from somewhere and we can't find what we're looking for quickly, we give up and look elsewhere.
61% the percentage of people who will quickly leave to another site if they can't find what they're looking for right away on a mobile site.
Because potential customers or clients are especially fleeting on the internet, it's critical that your organization's website makes it as easy as possible for potentials to find what they're looking for.
While you may know your customer base, there may be certain search terms that you may have not come across that most people are using to find the products or services you offer.
Beyond just making your site easy to find when people are searching for what you offer, a simple-to-use website is essential to preventing potentials from becoming lost opportunities.
A business website should have a navigation that makes it easy to find sought after products or services. This requires a business's website navigation to balance both search term goals and user expectations for where they'd assume to find certain information or services.
When you use a free website builder, you're left to solve these SEO, UX and navigation problems by yourself rather than working with a professional.
Before Using a Free Website Builder, Talk to a Web Design Company
There's a lot that can go wrong and little to nothing that can go right when using a free website builder. While a free website builder can help you put a website online, website builders often result in low online visibility and anemic online lead generation.
ACS Web Design & SEO has helped 200+ companies create a professional web design. Our over 19 years of experience include custom web designs for small businesses and national corporations.
- All of our websites are made to look and work equally well on phones, tablets and computers.
- Our team includes SEO professionals and analysts, delivering a web design solution that features a site structure that's optimized to achieve valuable positions on search engines.
- We make website editing easy with The ACS Edge CMS.
- Each of our website design projects are custom to achieve the individual goals of each client.
To discuss your organization's web design needs...
Schedule a Free Project Evaluation