4 November 2011
There's lots of website templates available tempting the customers with ideas such as 'quick and easy', 'no coding required', 'your website ready in 15 minutes' and more... are those worth the money really? Why bother choosing Web Designer then?

Website templates are great. You have hundreds of designs to choose from, you just add your pictures, some text and voila! Your new shiny website is ready. And it costs peanuts... well, usually anything between £15 to £60 per month depending on features unless you want something complicated like Flash or PHP script - that's always extra fees... The thing is is - you start from the cheap version and than you realise you need more features so you keep adding up and the fees just mount and you end up tied in to a contract that is costing you hundreds of pounds every year.
Let's ask this question - why do you need your website? In most cases it is to attract customers. Well, let's become that customer for a minute then. Let's imagine we are shopping at one of the large supermarkets, we are standing in a front of a huge row of shelves and we are looking for something, anything really. Supermarkets and product manufacturers spend thousands of pounds on research to find out why we choose one product over another - what do they find out? Well, we basically choose based on 3 criteria: 1 if he have used the product before, 2 if we heard about it (advertising) and 3 the packaging. In an ideal situation when there's a row full of products we have never seen or heard of we will choose the one we TRUST with our eyes, the one that has the most 'trustworthy' packaging. Let's translate that to your website. In a row of hundreds of websites the customer has never heard of which one will he choose? Will it be the one that looks just like the others but has different pictures on it? How would you choose if you were that customer?
Consider this - your customers are your livelihood. Your website is your first point of contact and it takes on average 8 seconds (!!!) for the customer to make up their mind if they like what they see. Your website is like a constant job interview - you need to make best first impression you possibly can. And this is something the website templates will never be good at. This is where the Web Designer comes into play.
We have spend years developing our skills so you, the customer don't have to waste your time. Our job is to turn your ideas into working product, into a website that will attract new customers and not be just one of many similar designs. In fact just over 60% of our customers tried templates before they came to us. They tried and realised that they seem to be a good value to start with but in the end they are just that - templates and potential customer looking at such website can see it and if they don't know your business they may just think 'oh well, just another company, nothing special about them...' and they move on to your competition.
Are Web Designers expensive? No! Well designed website is an asset not an expense. It will pay for itself within few weeks if not days and it will convince customers who see your website for the first time that YOU are the business worth dealing with.