Why the kid down the

street should not build

your website

I talk with all sizes of companies all the time about their websites. I am often surprised that a minority of these otherwise perfectly capable business people have trusted their website to the kid down the street, a brother-in-law or the cheapest developer they could find. The results have ranged from frustration to unmitigated disaster.

I have heard of major corporations being held captive because the rights to their URLs are owned by their web development company, the software used to create their site was proprietary and can’t be moved, updated or repaired, the servers hosting their site mysteriously vanished taking their site down with them or that the brother-in-law, who has taken more than two years to produce three pages, has found a new job and can’t finish their site.

Would you trust your inventory control system or POS to anyone other than a professional? What about your accounting or sales management? I thought not.

Over 80 per cent of the population and over 90 per cent of businesses check you out online long before they pick up the phone to call you. Can you trust this first point of contact with your business to that pimply-faced teenager who eats nachos while he builds your site to death metal in the middle of the night?

So here are my top 10 reasons to have your site built by a professional.

1. W3C compliance: You want to find a web development team that complies with the standards set down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), this will ensure that your site appears as it should across all platforms and browsers.

2. Clean code: Many amateur builders use off-the-shelf web development software packages or use others’ code as a starting point. Good developers use open source programs like PHP and MySQL when programming, ensuring that you are not limited by the software and that the site is transferable between developers. Cleanly coded sites load faster, rarely break and are ranked higher by the search engines.

3. Website navigation: Your site should be completely intuitive to move through. No one should have to guess or be forced to back out of the site. Redundant pages need to be removed and core information must be easily accessed. If your development team does not provide a site plan before building anything, run away screaming.

4. Vision: Great developers are thinking ahead. Did you know that sites that show (video) rather than tell (text) are ranking higher on popular search engines? Does your developer understand the ever-changing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques?