There are certain criteria that website designers and web developers should use when creating your website, social media or anything else for you on the web.
Many people focus only on price when it comes to hiring a website development company to create their website, social media for business, SEO (search engine optimization) and/or
website management.
Building a website is not like shopping for a television set as you can purchase the same brand and model at many different stores and still get the same quality tv set.
Building a website takes extensive knowledge and skill along with good morals and excellent customer service. Since many people do not know all that is involved in setting up a domain name, hosting and creating all of the necessary accounts for a business plus the actual design and building of a website, they rely on their website developer to do everything correctly and honestly.
The good news is that there is something in the web development industry called web standards which is a general term for the formal specifications and rules surrounding the building of web pages.
The bad news is that there is no regulation or licensing for website development and anyone can and will call themselves a “web designer/developer”, even if they have little to no skill.
If you are unfortunate enough to hire an unskilled web developer you can expect:
- Cheap prices for their services.
- Unwillingness to respond to your phone calls and e-mails.
- Pages that will be non-existent or nonfunctional with excuses of why they don’t work.
- You, the search engines and anything else they can use will be blamed for their “lack of production” or results.
- Your website, url and any accounts they create will be hijacked by them as they will not provide you with passwords or give you limited access to your own account. Or worse, create all accounts including your url and hosting in their name.
- When you are tired and frustrated dealing with them, you will have to start over from scratch with someone else, as anything they did will be useless or unattainable.
- They will brag about how long they have been doing websites but will not have any quality websites to show you.
- They may have changed their company name a few times to avoid negative online reviews.
- Just because they provide you with one password, doesn’t mean they have given you all of them used for your website and social media accounts.
- Initially they may seem nice but get angry and defensive when you ask too many questions.
Why would anyone in business do this? How can they sleep at night? Don’t they care about their reputation? Don’t they care about you and your business? The answer is they don’t care about you or the quality of work they produce. They just want your money!
Many talk a good game but do not back it up and you should be leary of them.
How do we know this? Because we have many clients who tell us their horror stories and we spend extensive amounts of time cleaning up other web developer’s messes.
Sometimes, the mess is to much to fix and the client has to start from scratch. We guide our clients from start to finish and create all accounts in their name. We build our websites with strict web standards and responsive design so that anyone who is a good website developer and knows what they are doing, could work on it giving you the freedom to make decisions in the best interest of your business.
True SEO (search engine optimization) for organic search results (non paid – your site showing up with a high rank in Google and other search engines) can only be
attained by following certain ethical guidelines.
Many of these unethical marketers and/or web developers will promise you first page listings for your website but Google states that “no one can guarantee first page results on Google”. Although we have great results getting our clients there, no one can “guarantee this”.
There are black hat (unethical techniques) that some people use to get quick first page listings and these may work for a short time but the search engines are very smart and will catch this. When they do, they will drop your website listing. Google and other search engines may also black list your website’s address making it almost impossible to recover.
Unskilled web developers will usually build your website with some obscure or outdated program or use sloppy code that is cheap to build. It may look OK to you but the back end will not work and the search engines will not list your site. Also, these types of websites are sometimes very difficult to change.
A good quality programmer will:
- Have legitimate current references from actual businesses and not their friends.
- Have long standing clients that are getting results.
- Show you a solid portfolio of previous websites they have built.
- Will have the skill to create function to your website by coding it themselves and will not rely heavily on third party programs or plugins.
- Return all of your phone calls and emails in a timely manner.
- Create all of your accounts and passwords in your name using your email address.
- Gladly answer all of your questions.
- Achieve traffic to your website using standard practices that will grow your online presence.
- Pay attention to detail and make sure all images, content and all functionality work perfectly on your website and social media.
- Will have good moral values and be honest.
We felt the need to post this information because we are saddened by good people falling prey to unscrupulous website developers. We have been cleaning up their messes for the past 4 years and it is heartbreaking to see small businesses blow their website budget, waste time, and get nothing in return from these unscrupulous people.
We wish more people would find us initially so that they can have a great experience and a fantastic web presence the first time.
When you are ready to have a website or want to revamp your existing website, get more traffic and create or beef up your company’s social media contact us or visit our website MasterWebsitePlanners.com!
We take the work out of you having a great website.
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