For years, there has been an abundance of website builders— GoDaddy Website Builder, Web.com, Weebly, Squarespace, Wix, to name a few of the biggest players in the market. These major companies host millions (yes, Weebly alone has over 40 million clients) of user-created websites. Most website builders’ plans range from free to just $25 / month. These services have spent years refining their interface to make building a website as easy and painless as possible. Most of them let you drag-and-drop sections, media and widgets onto a canvas to build your web page. Uploading images and adding text and pages is effortless.

 

So, with an easy interface and affordable price, why would you hire a professional web designer?

Here are 3 compelling reasons:

1. SEO — This is the #1 disadvantage of website builders. This is also the main reason small businesses who used website builder services ended up hiring us. Website builders focus on an easy-to-use interface, but the code that powers the resulting website is lackluster. A quick browse of the web page’s code shows a jumbled mess. Search engines like Google have a hard time reading this. Google provides clear documentation and tips on how to build a website with clean, W3C-compliant code that conforms to modern web standards. We make sure these guidelines are strictly followed on our custom and WordPress websites. Therefore, when a business hires us to convert their website from a website-builder site to either WordPress or custom, their search engine rankings always improve.
2. Time — Despite the ease-of-use, website builders still require you to devote many precious hours to designing and building your website. Most small business owners either don’t have time to spend on this or don’t want to — it’s just easier to hire this out to a professional. A dedicated website design company will spend time perfecting your website while you grow your business. Some people get frustrated building their own website; we, on the other hand, love these projects.
3. Quality Design — Squarespace has gorgeous templates to choose from. They have spent countless hours crafting beautifully-designed templates that look good right out of the box. Still, they are the exception. Many other website builders have the stigma of themes that are cookie-cutter and unprofessional. Even with professional, attractive themes out-of-the-box, design choices still exist, such as photo placement, overall color scheme, logo design, etc. A professional website design firm, such as Pioneer Media in Knoxville, TN, is trained to make the smart design decisions for an aesthetically-pleasing and conversion-built website.

 

There you have it! If you are convinced a website builder service is not for you, or you’ve outgrown yours, contact us at Pioneer Media for a professional, custom-designed website tailored to fit your needs.