# Build you own site vs professional designed site?



## lukeneale (May 14, 2011)

Hi

At the moment I have a build you own website and tbh is looks ok, however the amount of hits I have to my site compared to calls/emails/ jobs isn't that good, so it got me thinking!

Has anyone gone from a build you own site to a professionally designed site and seen a difference is business?

Advice needed!

Thanks a lot

Luke


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## lukeneale (May 14, 2011)

Please help? Anyone with professionally designed sites has this made you get more business?


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## m1pui (Jul 24, 2009)

Perhaps showing us what your current site looks like might put people in a position to give you some advice


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## Ric (Feb 4, 2007)

Making your own from a premade theme is easy.

Mine for example, its from a theme but i've made changes easily.

SEO and the social arena is how to get hits, make the content engaging and people will come.

www.urbanpixels.co.uk


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## PaulN (Jan 17, 2008)

Theres a decent bloke on here called Jamest he design our site for us and he really was great to deal with. I cant recommend him enough.


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## Frans D (May 23, 2011)

If you want a good website, you have to pay attention to quite a few things;

1) Design: Does it fit your bussiness and does it look professional enough?

2) SEO: Is your rank in the search engines good enough?

3) Search engine results: Do your potential customers land on the right page, with a certain search phrase?

4) User friendly: Are all your contents found easily enough (it shouldn't be a maze of menu's)?

5) Content: Does it represent your bussiness well enough?

If you score high on all these points together; without no doubt you should be able to draw serious customers.
If you only score well on only one of these points the customer will leave your site and will search further.

Just an example; You've made a site and to do extra well in Google, you've put a load of search phrases in your body with the same color font as your body. When you try some search phrases in a search engine you've notice that you don't score bad because of those hidden words.
So a potential customer does the same and he's searching (for example) for a Italian Styled red grey Marble tile. So your site pops on on top of the results and the potential customer clicks on it. However instead of landing on the relevant page, he arrives on your main page and a Italian Styled red grey Marble tile is nowere to be found. Almost 80% of your visitors will leave directly and search for another bussiness, the other 20% will make an efford to see if he can find info on this tile, but if it isn't there or the site isn't user friendly, they will also leave in the end.

If you do well on all these points, you should check things like how many competition you have, are their prices and services different, how long do they exist, etc. etc.


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## lukeneale (May 14, 2011)

To be honest with my build your own website it doesn't look professional, u can tell its a template, as it doesn't look clean, sharpe ect.

I pay for a company to do Adwords for me and I seem to get a flow of customers ( got a counter at the bottom of my site ) 

I just thought of getting a professionally built site will help with converting the customers that visit my site into calls/emails?

What you think?


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## robertdon777 (Nov 3, 2005)

For customers who wish to design there own site (and aren't that skilled at design) I would always suggest using Wix.com (use the HTML5 Templates not the Flash ones).

It is the easiest solution, not the cheapest but not that expensive.

If they have some technical knowledge I would suggest Wordpress to them.


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## lukeneale (May 14, 2011)

I use a company called fast hosts - tbh they are ok and my site is presentable but you can tell its not professional! Just wondering If I got one designed if they will have an effect of people visiting my website?

Thanks

Luke


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## m1pui (Jul 24, 2009)

Again, what is it your site is trying to promote? (A link would be good too if it's allowed)

If you're trying to sell cd's and pinch sales from play.com, then obviously you're going to need something swish. If you're trying to promote and get gigs for your band, you could probably redo it yourself quite easily using an offline site builder and some themes/templates or something like Wordpress.


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## lukeneale (May 14, 2011)

Pmd mate


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## Frans D (May 23, 2011)

The choice on what kind of website to use is depending on quantity of pages and if it will be static or dynamic.

If it will be a static website with not much pages I prefer a HTML website.
You don't have to be afraid of vunerability (regarding safety), software updates etc.

If it will be a dynamic website with a lot of pages and a lot of changeable content, I prefer to use a CMS.
The advantage of a CMS is that a customer can change or add content himself, without a chance of destroying the website.
Negative side is that you constantly have to stay on top of updates, because of safety reasons.

If you want some tips about your website, you can always PM me.


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## Grommit (May 3, 2011)

carbonangel said:


> Making your own from a premade theme is easy.
> 
> Mine for example, its from a theme but i've made changes easily.
> 
> ...


Great little blog there dude. !


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## shinyporsche (Oct 30, 2012)

To be honest - ugly sells.

As a rule, the more ‘designed` your site looks, the harder you will have to work to make that site give you a good visitor to enquiry ratio.

Sites that people design themselves generally better reflect the business that you are, and better reflect the type of customer that you know well. Its a lovely feeling to look at your website and feel some joy because it looks like it belongs to a multi-national conglomerate , but if your customer wants to find a small local detailing company … that’s one hell of an expensive feeling.


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## CraigQQ (Jan 20, 2011)

I disagree.. 

A well designed site portrays you are a serious professional company.

I have a professional designed site and it's slick and looks good imo. I am very happy with it.


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## shinyporsche (Oct 30, 2012)

CraigQQ said:


> I disagree..
> A well designed site portrays you are a serious professional company.


You're absolutely right it does. Things like poor spelling or very poor navigation are a serious problem.

Most business websites should, these days, be creating new business as well as setting an impression of your company. If somebody visits a website and thinks they've found a great professional business but doesn't go on to buy from that business then it's a bit of a shame.

As a rule of thumb you should be expecting to turn between 10 and 20% of your site visitors to your desired action - that's placing an order, or leaving an enquiry, or making your phone ring - whatever you like them to do.


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## robertdon777 (Nov 3, 2005)

shinyporsche said:


> As a rule of thumb you should be expecting to turn between 10 and 20% of your site visitors to your desired action - that's placing an order, or leaving an enquiry, or making your phone ring - whatever you like them to do.


If you can do that, the large ecommerce business's will bite your hand off.

20% is a massive figure 1 in 5 visits produces a sale. I think any web owner would be in dreamland with figures like that.

Even small detailing sites can get an easy 1,000 visits per month (many much much more), that's 200 details or valets just from the website side of advertising.


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## Dixondmn (Oct 12, 2007)

I used a company called developwebdesign they did a fantastic job for me.
plus i simply dont have the time.


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## chch (Jan 2, 2010)

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

shinyporsche said:


> As a rule of thumb you should be expecting to turn between 10 and 20% of your site visitors to your desired action - that's placing an order, or leaving an enquiry, or making your phone ring - whatever you like them to do.


That's ridiculous the "average" conversion will differ depending on product/market.

As for the original question, get it done properly from someone who will get the HTML structure set up properly for SEO and hopefully won't put a visible counter on the site or a clock on the side.


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## m1pui (Jul 24, 2009)

jamest said:


> ...and hopefully won't put a visible counter on the site or a clock on the side.


^^ This. It's like going back to the days of GeoCities :lol:


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## Paul_D (Sep 26, 2012)

There was a good point made earlier in this thread about HTML 5 (as opposed to Flash) that seems to have been overlooked..


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## m1pui (Jul 24, 2009)

I don't think it's been overlooked as such. OP's gotten a web-designer on the case according to the PM I got.


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## Paul_D (Sep 26, 2012)

That's alright then..


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## lukeneale (May 14, 2011)

Hi guys

Thanks a lot for all the comments, I have indeed got a designer to create one, due to not being the best with computers and not having the time, I'll update with links when done.

Thanks again

Luke


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## robertdon777 (Nov 3, 2005)

Yeah be good to see it.

And some clocks are good on websites ie. BBC one, at least you can tell if you are seeing an up-to-date live website rather than a cached one. But in general yeah leave them in the 90's!


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## shinyporsche (Oct 30, 2012)

jamest said:


> That's ridiculous the "average" conversion will differ depending on product/market.


It does. That's why I said you should be looking to achieve between 10 and 20% visitor to enquiry ratio - typically. Some good sites will do less, others even more than that.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

shinyporsche said:


> It does. That's why I said you should be looking to achieve between 10 and 20% visitor to enquiry ratio - typically. Some good sites will do less, others even more than that.


You have no idea what market he is in unless I have missed something. Different markets will have vastly different averages.

Throwing arbitrary numbers around puts people in to bad situations thinking XX isn't working because they don't have the same numbers as YY.


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## shinyporsche (Oct 30, 2012)

jamest said:


> You have no idea what market he is in unless I have missed something. Different markets will have vastly different averages.
> 
> Throwing arbitrary numbers around puts people in to bad situations thinking XX isn't working because they don't have the same numbers as YY.


A website isn't just there to float about in the internet and accidentally to be found. We drive traffic there of our own choosing by how we choose to advertise it, promote it, market it. What counts as a conversion will vary from market to market but the conversion rate really shouldn't that much if you're going to have a site you can control.

A website that converts at less than say 5% is virtually impossible to steer because you do not know which of your visitors are the ones that will likely bite. Changes to the site become slow and virtually impossible to pin down.

Aim for 10% or better and you can start to see patterns and then use them to improve your promotion, improve your site and grow your sales.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

shinyporsche said:


> A website isn't just there to float about in the internet and accidentally to be found. We drive traffic there of our own choosing by how we choose to advertise it, promote it, market it. What counts as a conversion will vary from market to market but the conversion rate really shouldn't that much if you're going to have a site you can control.
> 
> A website that converts at less than say 5% is virtually impossible to steer because you do not know which of your visitors are the ones that will likely bite. Changes to the site become slow and virtually impossible to pin down.
> 
> Aim for 10% or better and you can start to see patterns and then use them to improve your promotion, improve your site and grow your sales.


In which case you should be aiming for 100% not 10%.

A company like Ford is going to get more enquiries than Aston Martin. Doesn't mean their website is better nor that the product is better. Currys are likely to have a better conversion than Ford but that doesn't mean they are comparable in any way other than they get visits and they have goals that they want customers to complete.

As for 5% vs 10% you can get useful stats out of both of them. The only difference is you will need to wait longer to get the stats for the 5% as you will need to double the traffic to get the same conversions assuming that they 5% stays as the average.

The fact that someone is on DW asking if they should get their site designed professionally or not kind of shows that they won't be getting anywhere near enough traffic to determine anything nor will they have enough traffic to split test parts of their site.


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## shinyporsche (Oct 30, 2012)

jamest said:


> In which case you should be aiming for 100% not 10%.
> 
> A company like Ford is going to get more enquiries than Aston Martin. Doesn't mean their website is better nor that the product is better.


True. Which is why we focus on conversion rates. What percentage of your visitors do on the site what we want them to do.

I bet Ford and Aston Martin have pretty much similar conversion rates though.

Think of a website like a shop. If only 5% of the people who walk into your shop buy something, don't alter the things inside the shop - move it somewhere else or change the window display. When one in 5 or 3 in ten start to buy things then it's time to put your staff in uniforms and polish the counter.

If you get the right people to your website you have to really go some in terms of unattractiveness to stop them buying.


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