Outsourcing Small Business Web Development

Outsourcing Small Business Web Development

on Sep 10, 2016 in Small business

Outsourcing web development for your small biz

Here are some of the costs of building your website and why you should leave it to the professionals

Are you thinking about developing a website for your small business but unsure how to go about it? It seems pretty easy doesn’t it?

While it may seem like a good idea to build a website it isn’t as easy as it first seems.

Sure, you don’t have the financial outlay at the start, but beware of the hidden costs. The costs of your website not running as smoothly as it could be.

Here’s what it cost me and why outsourcing web development is the key to getting your business up and running smoothly.


 

How I developed my website

I developed my website using WordPress.org. After doing an SEO  course I knew that for Google to see me, I needed a WordPress.com site that was self-hosted.

So I found a hosting company (Bluehost), registered my domain name, and started again.

Which meant moving from a WordPress URL to www.kellynicoleodonnell.com.

 

Customising WordPress themes and CSS coding

 

I spent so much time trying to work out how to do the following:

  • putting images and hyperlinks in widgets;
  • adding my contact details in the footer;
  • underlining hyperlinks in the page text but not the footer;
  • changing heading sizes and colours;
  • altering line spacing or padding of heading styles;
  • creating a child theme; or
  • adding alt text to a theme’s homepage as it wasn’t supported as part of the theme.

But, playing around with the back-end code of my website cost me a fair bit.

I made these 10 WordPress mistakes in the process and I’ve seen the ‘white screen of death’ – many times.

 

 

 

I’ve wasted lots of time with coding in WordPress

Time that I can’t get back. Firstly, by trying to develop it myself I took away so much of my time for other things. Secondly, as I didn’t always do it properly I had to redo a lot of things that I’d stuffed up in the process. And it wasn’t just once. It happened many times. The first year of my freelance writing business would have been much different if I’d enlisted the help of a web developer.

The cost of my website mistakes

While I’ve looked at all the mistakes I made along the way in WordPress, I now see that doing this has had a lot of impact. And has potentially cost me a lot of customers. Here’s how.

 

Inconsistent branding

I started off with one theme which was green, then I tried a few others for a day or so. Then I splurged and bought the theme I’m using today. So my brand has not been the same from the start.

 

Downtime when my website wasn’t up and running

When I’d played around with my site’s backend, I’d managed to corrupt one of my php files. So my website was offline and not generating leads. And I have done this repeatedly through my lack of programming experience.

 

No customers via SEO

My website wasn’t set up with SEO in mind. Nor had I submitted my site to Google for indexing. So no one had a hope of finding me. My website was way behind with trying to rank for any keywords.

 

Potential customers driven away through lots of 404s (not found pages)

Ok, I now know about never, ever deleting a webpage. What you should do instead is create a new one and re-direct the old one using a 301 redirect. That way you’ll maintain any search ranking you’ve achieved. I didn’t know about redirecting pages I’d cleaned up. So there were quite a few pages and images I’d deleted which weren’t going anywhere. Bad for user experience.

 

Consider outsourcing website development

Your time is important. And so is your business. Rather than wasting time with WordPress you could be developing your business. You could be growing your business through networking. Or by customising processes and workflows. Even building a social media presence.

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Rinet IT is my go-to for web development and changes that I need to make.

Rinet IT provides web design/developer services specialising in WordPress; and also Joomla and Drupal. Rinet IT’s design philosophy is to keep designs crisp and modern. Designs that make it easy for your customers to find and get what they want, when they visit your website is part of what Rinet IT seeks to achieve.

Building a website that is easy for search engines to find your site and rank you well is vital and is an important component of your website’s design. Online shopping technology that Rinet IT has experience with includes Woocommerce (with WordPress), Virtuemart and DigiStore (Joomla) and Magento.

Domain name registration and web hosting services are also available with any Rinet IT web design job.

 

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