When our car breaks down or we have electrical problems in our homes we always seek out professionals to fix our problems. These professionals have many years of experience and often have credentials to back them up. I’ve noticed a trend lately in the web design and development field. More and more people want a website, but they don’t hire professionals. They spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars on a website only to find out that the person or company they hired has no real experience in web design or development. They get stranded with a poorly, if at all, functional website that does not perform well across multiple platforms and devices. These sites also perform poorly in search engines.
Why do unprofessional sites perform poorly?
Unprofessional sites perform poorly for a number of reasons. A sites poor performance is mostly due to inexperience and lack of knowledge of how websites work. A few things that cause sites to perform poorly are:
- Overuse of frameworks and plugins: Many people use open source software to build websites; WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are among some of the most popular. Inexperienced people or companies will use frameworks and plugins to build sites because they have no coding experience. If something breaks or you need more functionality, they will not be able to provide this to you. This also causes thousands of lines of unnecessary code to run on your site, causing slow load times and sometimes even security issues.
- Bloated markup and code: Many sites use more markup and code than necessary. A professional has years of experience refining markup and code to be efficient and minimal.
- Non-semantic HTML: Most unprofessional sites have little to no semantic HTML. Semantic HTML gives your content meaning. Headings, sections, and other important data can be given different levels of importance throughout the page. Without semantic HTML, your site will perform poorly in search engines.
- No Optimizations: Optimizations go a long way. Optimizations include: minimal markup and code, compressing images for the web and choosing the correct formats, and even properly loading resources.
- Outsourcing: Many firms have started outsourcing work to India and other countries. Much of the outsourced work is outdated or not properly coded.
How can I know I am hiring a professional?
It can be a difficult task to hire a professional. There are quite a few companies out there that outsource 100% of their work offshore or to the lowest bidder to maximize profits. Their goal is to churn out unprofessional sites to unsuspecting clients looking for cheap website options. These companies prey on customers not knowing how the web works and can cost customers a lot of money in lost revenue and missed opportunities.
To know if you are hiring a professional, you should always ask for credentials.
- Does the company hire professionals with college degrees? Or if you are working with an individual, do they have a college degree or certifications?
- Will the company or individual provide references to past clients?
- Check out the company’s or individual’s portfolio? Make sure their past websites look and function properly.
Hiring a professional is important with so many options in the market. Your website is your potential customer’s first impression, make sure you have a professional website that turns visitors into sales.
At GraphicTEN, we only hire professional designers and developers to work on your projects. We take pride in offering only the best quality websites to our clients.