Retire Young and Wealthy

Small business owners have to keep an eye on expenses, and are more apt to tackle projects on their own. Busy work – making copies, filing, charging batteries, etc. – cut into the time you have to make money, but unless you hired someone very cheaply, it wouldn’t make financial sense to hire them out.

There are other jobs, however, that we sometimes take on foolishly. Jobs that take a long time to learn or complete when an expert could handle them better in half the time should be farmed out. Whether website design for your business falls under “reasonable expense” depends on your needs and your skills at this time.

Evaluate Your Customers

What you need from your website begins and ends with your clients. Consider the following:

- What service or products do you offer?
- Who buys them?
- How do customers find out about your business?
- What kind of business will they trust?

If you aren’t sure about these questions, check out your competition. Look at the kind of sites they have and whether or not it meets all the needs of your kind of business.

Having a presence online is helpful for most businesses, but the style, information and customer contact you provide will differ based on the needs of your clients. The basic website most people can make after buying a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get, or wizzywig) editor, and investing the time it takes to learn it, may not fit the image you want for your business.

Evaluate Sales Potential

A mistake many small businesses make when building their website is ignoring the potential for making online sales. Learning how to get sales online takes a great deal of research, but there are forums for business owners that do make this easier.

Here are a few common ways small business owners monetize their websites for sales:

1. Create an online store with photos and product descriptions, add an online shopping cart for processing payments, and get notifications sent to your cell phone so you know when and where to send the items.

2. Have an online registration hub for businesses offering classes, or holding conventions.

3. Let customers contact you with service requests sent straight to your cell phone, with general questions on customer service directed to your email.

Evaluate Your Programs, Skills and Budget

Unless you plan to code by hand, you will need a program for web design. The most popular and widely used are Front Page and Dreamweaver. There are a few free programs online that are very similar to them, however, so you may not need to go to that expense. In addition to design software, you will need something for making graphics, logos and other pictures.

Adobe Photoshop has the market on this type of software, although again, free options exist. The only drawback to them is that many classes, both on- and offline, focus on popular programs to teach you how to build a site, and starting over with a free program might take longer to put into practice.

No matter your level of design knowledge, you can find classes online that will help you improve. Many community colleges and learning centers also offer website building classes. Online, as well, you can find tutorials – both written and visual – to show you how to create what you need. Website building, as a general rule, takes a lot of tweaking. Browsers, programming languages and software are constantly changing.

Should YOU Make Your own Site or Hire a Professional?

Experts in website design can offer you priceless advice for increasing sales, drawing in new traffic, and developing trust with your customers. Learning how to create a professional site on your own may take money and time that would be better spent developing your business. Unless you are planning to expand your business to add design services, this would be a one-time investment. In addition, where hiring a designer would be tax deductible, taking classes and buying programs for the purpose of making your website may not be considered a “regular and necessary” expense you can write off on your taxes.

For most people who are looking for more than a business card online, hiring a designer saves more money than it spends. Just as “time is money” successful small business owners also know that sometimes “it takes money to make money.” That is often the case when it comes to website design.

Photo Credit: Web Design Served by Liliana Opina

Mary Blanchard works as a blog writer and a financial advisor. She has provided advice on some of the best deal sites in the UK. She recommends the Coupon Croc, check them out to see why.