Should I Hire a Web Consultant?

So you want a cool website for your business but you don’t know where to begin. Hiring an expert in the field to consult for you may not be as expensive as you think and can save you a lot of headache in the long run. If you are going to spend the time and energy building an online presence for your business you may as well get it right the first time! I know you want to take shortcuts but the web is your shop and brand front and cannot be ignored.

In almost every industry, the internet is the first place your potential clients will look and the research shows that it will take them less than 30 seconds to decide if you are worth their time or not. Wow, so they better like what they see. Now back to consulting. There are few things you need to keep in mind for your website and they may not all come from the same source.

The main areas are strategy, research/discovery, goals, branding, design, development, promotion and then of course ongoing management.

A consultant may recommend using one company for all of these components or dedicated brand developers, design consultants, web developers and online marketers depending on your project. Either way, a good consultant has the right connections in know how in the industry to get you the best value for your budget. It is important to make sure that they charge you a fee as opposed to favouring certain businesses for a piece of the pie. This way you can be sure that they are looking out for your best interests.

Can I Do It Myself

If you want to do it all your self, try wordpress.org and use one their one click install hosts. WordPress is known to be SEO freindly and has such a large community that you can find a plugin for everything imaginable without having to do any coding yourself. The content management system is one of the most user freindly off the shelf CMS’s in the world. And the best part, it’s free!