Why do website designers let you down?

We hear it all the time; “I’ve lost confidence in my web designer” ,  “my web agency take too long to make changes” or “I’ve no idea what I pay my web designers for” … but why? Why do web designers let clients down?

First of all it’s important to note that not all web designers do this; there are thousands of good ones out there. I guess it’s a bit like a handful of ‘cowboy builders’ giving their industry a bad name.

It’s also worth mentioning that the majority of the bad web designers don’t do it deliberately; they just bite off more than they can chew (although I can provide examples of several malicious web designers).

One of the main issues is that the website design industry is unregulated, and web designers do not need qualifications. Anyone can make a website, and I mean this literally; there are DIY website building tools on the market that get you a basic website yourself in under an hour. Using an analogy here, I can go to an arts and craft shop and buy paint and a brush, and I can paint a picture. This doesn’t however make me an artist, and doesn’t mean that my painting will be hanging in the Tate any time soon.

“Building a website is completely different to building an effective website”

There are also lots of platforms and systems available that allow people to set up web design companies, yet all they do is populate templates created by others. These people set themselves up as website designers but are doing little more than ‘painting by numbers’.

The client will find a web design agency, and they see a very low-cost alternative to a product that, on paper at least, will be the same. And yes, at the end of the day the client will have a website that didn’t cost them much; but if that website doesn’t perform as it’s supposed to, then it may as well not be there.

This is where the issues start. Perhaps the website doesn’t look like the client wants it to; perhaps it doesn’t rank highly in Google, perhaps it runs slow or gets hacked; if the website doesn’t perform and make the phone ring, then the client will not be happy. Unfortunately when the client asks their web agency to fix or update things, they’ll find that the web agency may be out of their depth.  They may be short-staffed, or lack the technical know-how… after all they have created a low-cost website by filling in a template; they have ‘painted by numbers’.

This is where professional web design agencies come in. Yes they charge slightly more; but they will deliver websites that work, websites that produce enquiries, websites that will give their clients a return on their investment.

The web agencies charge more because they have a team in place each with their own specialist skill-set that’s taken years of training; ideally a graphic designer, a front end developer, a back end coder, a marketing and search engine expert … I could go on.

When you’re building a house you don’t recruit a brick layer to be your architect because he’s cheap… and the same can be said with a web designer; we all have different skill sets, and only collectively can we produce a truly effective end product.

The old quote “If you pay peanuts you get monkeys” is so true; and it really does pain us to watch a client go for the cheaper option, only to recruit us several months later because in their words, they’ve wasted their money.

So a lot of website designers let you down because anyone can set up a website design business, and a lot of people do without having the expertise. They can promise the world, but ultimately can’t deliver.

We do deliver; don’t take our word for it though, here’s a client saying that we’ve generate him 52 times more enquiries than what he had before.

We are Webbed Feet ^UK, we make websites that work.