Useful Tips to Remove the Drama from your Business’s Website Development

As we become even more reliant on the digital world following the pivot point of 2020 caused by the coronavirus, businesses need to think about what their customers want and need from their website development. Put simply, if you’re not meeting the needs of your target audience when they land on your site, they’re not going to spend the time trying to navigate the site, they’ll just go to a competitor who’s fully accommodated their requirements. But does this mean you need a ‘bespoke’ design?

Bespoke is a word that is often seen as constituting exclusivity and style, but when your business’s website development is bespoke, that exclusivity can become a nightmare. But why? As a general rule, the more ‘bespoke’ your website developer has made the programming and coding of your site, the more difficult it is to change things or fix problems quickly and cheaply. If the developer you hired to build your website is the only person who knows how to make it works correctly, they essentially have you on the hook.

So what can you do to build a website in a way that is inexpensive to both build and run and provides quality user experience (UX) to pull in the number of conversions you want to achieve? The answer is quite simple, but first, you must have an insight into how a bespoke website will impact on your business vs the alternative.

Web developers aren’t experts in SEO

The same story plays out over and over again. A business wants their website development to stand out and have a big impact on its conversion rates and overall branding, so they fork out a significant amount of money to a web developer to create their dream website.

However, while web developers are highly technical, they often can’t offer the full package that your website needs to be able to attract prospects.

SEO is one of these examples. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines, so getting this step right is absolutely essential.

If a web developer isn’t also an expert in SEO, no matter how attractive your website is, it’s probably not going to rank high enough on Google to get the click-through rate you are aiming for.

Why is a bespoke build website so difficult to update?

When a web developer creates a bespoke website, you’ll often find that it is built in their preferred style and structure, which may not be very accessible to anyone else coming in to make changes. One example is the headers and footers of your site. It seems like a fairly straightforward process to alter and update them. But if your site has been built in an unnecessarily complex way, you’ll have to pay for a complex solution, resulting in significant cost.

Problems with hosting

No matter what calibre your website development is, it will need hosting. However, if you employ a developer who uses their own hosting, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to the fallout of relationship breakdowns. If this happens, you can be held to ransom. This means you could not have access to your website, and a new web developer may be unable to access it to fix any problems or simply update its contents.

On top of that, the site may or may not be backed up, but with websites with bespoke programming, it’s not accessible to you if you need to do a quick restore.

The hosting of the website can also cause issues if you involve another company in improving your website. Because you won’t have access to the hosting control panel, the impact a different company can have is restricted, even with collaboration between the company and developer.

WordPress and Plugins

Many business owners are already aware of how essential content and customisation is for building and maintaining a successful site with a healthy amount of traffic. WordPress and plugins are an essential part of this. However, they can’t be easily updated because they have built it with bespoke code and so the site gets hacked through vulnerabilities that have been fixed in later versions of the software.

Changes to your website are chargeable

As well as being unable to access the hosting of your website yourself, you can’t make changes, and due to the developer’s coding, you probably wouldn’t know where to start either way. You’ll have to employ the same developer to make any changes to your website, all of which are chargeable. This can be really frustrating, especially when the changes are small and quickly add up.

No internal caching system

There is no integral caching system that connects your site to the server to get speed improvements.

No Cloudflare

There is no way to connect a system call Cloudflare, which distributes your content around the globe and protects you from attacks.

What’s the alternative?

As you’ve (hopefully) picked up from this article, hiring a web developer to create a bespoke website isn’t just a one-time cost, and doesn’t assure you of complete ownership, access and control over your website. Due to these frustrations, we have developed the skills to build a website that keeps you in control.

Using the latest technology, we are able to do the following:

Hosting that suits you

We set up the website under your name on hosting with siteground.co.uk, which is an affordable and professional platform. With this you get:

• Integrated cache plugin to connect the website to the server and speed up the website
• Automated backups and one-click restore from a control panel that’s under your control
• Free SSL certificate to give you a padlock (https://)
• Free Cloudflare which increases speed and security
• Automated staging software that would allow you to take a copy of your website and test ideas on it
• Automated updates so that the system will keep your website automatically updated
• Very low-cost security checking software to do a daily test to ensure the site hasn’t been compromised.
• We can loosely connect via Siteground so that we can manage your account whilst you are completely independent

Get a bespoke website without the programming

We carry out your website development using a toolkit, which means a bespoke site can be created without any programming. This means that we can allow Siteground to update the site without fear of breaking it. With the tools, we are able to be very flexible in the design without creating bespoke code that can hinder updating or fixing problems.

Better site structure

The structure of the website means that it can be optimised to be found on Google, and it can be optimised for speed.

Reliable security safe from hackers

Because of the security of good backup and restore, we can give you full access to WordPress in the knowledge that the site can be restored within minutes if something did break.

Using Siteground for your website development means your site is up to date, backed up and secure as it can be from hackers.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you should be left with a good understanding of the pitfalls of website development and will use your newfound knowledge to be cautious to avoid them. If you’re still set on hiring an independent developer, you can read more about why selecting a website developer is so important here.

Paying to have someone build your website to have a great UX to attract more business, and to build it in a way that is easily accessible, secure, and customisable is one of the best solutions to maintain controls over the reigns of your business.

If you want to create or update your business’s website, but don’t know where to start, get in touch, and we can help you achieve your website and broader marketing goals.

If you’d like more information on how to expand build or update a website that you have control over, KUB is here to help. Get in touch to see how you could be growing your business through better website development.