Smart businesses invest in themselves to become more successful. That’s especially true when it comes to digital and online marketing, so it always comes as a surprise when I see a company choose to skimp on the project that can work for their company while they sleep.
This post was spurred by learning that someone we’ve worked with long-term has chosen to have their website redesigned by the lowest priced offer. Shopping on price isn’t always wise, lets look at why.
In this case, we’re looking at a long established site, one that drives reservations and business for a seasonal travel activity and destination. The site has years of blog posts and lots of information about the region, about fishing and about what it’s like to fish under their guidance. The existing site drives traffic that results in business.
I know from experience that some low cost design teams aren’t paying much attention to what's already in place or SEO or things like maintaining the same URLs or making sure that the site architecture is carried over. In many of the cases, they aren’t even considering the business behind the website, it's mostly about sticking content into a template.
How do I know this? Because over the years, I’ve sorted out many sites, fixing the problems introduced in this scenario, and more often than not, there’s not much money saved, in the long run, between losses in traffic and spending to have things corrected.
It's like a bucket with holes that doesn’t hold much water. This is how your website bucket ends up with multiple holes.
So what other kinds of things have happened?
- Changes to site architecture like changing URLs when it isn’t necessary and without doing proper redirects causing a loss in traffic.
- Replacing indexable content with text in images, (search engines don't read images) causing a change in traffic from important keywords.
- Using unoptimized images with huge file sizes creating a poor user experience.
- Adding slideshows with dozens of slides creating long load times on the home page.
- Unoptimizing by removing or changing any optimizations already in place on the site, now all the title tags read “Welcome to our website”
- Breaking a site’s mobile responsive coding because they only designed for the desktop, creating a mobile experience that decreased mobile user traffic.
- Removing analytics and other tracking including retargeting and conversion codes.
- Deindexing the site by basically telling the search engines to go away.
In every project there are details that matter and there are details that you might not have known to consider. These are the things our team takes into account and we have conversations with you to go over the ins and outs of various elements, the best ways to approach them. We want to make certain the approach taken is the best one within the constraints, given the goals of the project. This means we’ll tell you if you want to do something that isn’t a best practice or that could cause problems and we’ll tell you why, what your options are, so you can make an educated decision. That’s the difference and it makes a difference.