Professional Business or Corporate Websites
For many people the lines are fairly blurred between various types of websites. If someone asked you to differentiate between a personal website and a professional website, built for a business by a web designer – what would you say? Less exciting? More boring details? Pictures of Staff? Maybe an Ecommerce portion with products for sale? Is that it?
The answer of course, varies. Ecommerce is indeed a major component of business websites – especially those with physical products that they can easily ship to clients. However, maybe your business doesn’t have products. Maybe, like OmniOnline, you sell important services instead. What should your business website look like? What are reasonable goals or expectations for it?
The number one goal or function our clients identify for their corporate websites is to drive the user to contact them. Second is usually to inform or educate them on their industry, services or products. So if these are your goals, what can you expect or even ask of your web designer and your corporate website to achieve these goals?
Careful Planning
It sounds simple but the first thing you should expect from any professional web designer is an aspect of research and planning. Your designer should start by asking you a lot of questions, learning about your business, your goals for it, how it works and also about you personally. This goes way beyond your favorite color. An important part of a professional website design is the planning stage. Unlike personal websites or blogs that can change frequently, your corporate or business website is a significant investment and its that part of your business that you are putting on display for the world to see. It can’t change drastically every few months and it’s unacceptable to have something broken, out-dated or clearly a poor reflection of your business floating around out there. You also don’t want a website that is out-of-date in just a year or relying on some technology that is no longer widely-used. Just the opposite, a professional designer building a corporate website for you should be able to plan ahead, and then articulate to you how their design and web development is pointing forward, relying on the most modern technology and going to look good and function well – into the future.
Professionalism
I’m not talking about your designer’s appearance. Your web designer should be professional enough and savvy enough to take those pieces of information you provide and work them into the product they are giving back to you. For instance, if you take a classic approach to your business and rely on handshakes, request an in-person meeting with your designer and explain that you don’t enjoy spending time on the computer – your web designer should not be sending you proofs via some complex app or writing out long, technical design rationales for you in an email. The whole point of hiring a professional web designer and making that investment is to find someone who understands the industry and the technology and can then communicate well, listen to your needs and wants and turn around and produce something that meets your business needs, while simultaneously sheltering you (as much as possible) from the tasks that you do not want to do in the first place. A true professional should be seasoned and experienced enough to not just design or build your website but to advise you or direct you on good business decisions, along that process.
Functionality
You hire a professional web designer because you want to expedite the process of getting a high quality business website. You don’t want some goofy product that you have to wrestle with and figure out on your own. You need something that works and frees you up to focus on what you know – your business. So in the end, if you are not getting a product that accomplishes the goals you had for it and works well – maybe its time to find another service provider. If your conversations with your web designer focus on why things can’t work the way you want them to, then getting a second opinion is never a bad idea. Here at OmniOnline, if we can’t ask you for a 5-star review at the end of our time working with you, then we haven’t done our job. That’s our standard. We feel like you should be excited to work with us again because the process went so smoothly, and you felt heard and involved throughout. I hope your web designer has the same standards!
Service is the Key
We say it right on our homepage. The web design industry is a competitive market. We know that you pour your heart and soul into your business and when it comes to putting your company out on the world wide web for everyone to see – you want to be proud! So if you want to build your personal blog or family website on your own or with some freebee DIY service – go for it. But when it comes to your corporate or business website, find a professional. Shop around and remember that more important than price, is the service you receive. There is nothing worse than needing changes to your business website and not being able to get in touch with your web designer or calling them and advising them of the need for a change and then waiting for days or weeks before getting any service. We are a business ourselves so we understand budgets and business expenses. We think service is the number one thing you should be looking for in a web design professional.
At OmniOnline we feel that our level of service is what sets us apart from our competition.
So if you’re wanting a new professional business website or your unsatisfied with your current provider, or you’d just like some advice or direction on how your corporate web presence could be doing more for your bottom line, come see us at 1420 Broad Street, Regina SK or call us at 306-586-6118. We’d love to chat about we can help you meet your goals for your business!