We all have heard of the notion that anyone starting your own business, or starting anything nowadays, whether it be a product your trying to sell, start your own blog or building a portfolio will need a website.
I know many who hear that can be somewhat be turned off especially if they have no tech skills at all or simply don’t even know where to begin.
But before you jump to hire a creative agency or a developer from your top rated freelance site. Let’s hear why it’s best to hire a developer as opposed to learning to create a website yourself with an open source software such as WordPress.
To best illustrate this let’s look at Mary’s story as a small business owner who wants to start her own apple pie service.
Mary is a stay at home mom who loves to bake apple pies for her 3 kids school events. In fact she does it so well that the other parents and teachers have suggested to her that she start her own business and start selling her pies.
They told her that she could even collect orders online so she knows how many orders she will have to make for the week.
There is one problem though. Mary has no idea how to build a website, let alone where to begin. She has only heard of something called a content management system called WordPress but to her that sounds like a digital printing press for news reporters.
With the business idea in mind Mary begins to do some research on where to begin in order to create a website. But wait, thatss not the only thing she has to worry about if she is going to follow through on this idea of selling her delicious pies.
She needs to find out how to begin advertising and promoting her services. Uh oh! It seems a list is beginning to pile up for her but she is still interested in seeing where selling her pies could lead her.
She begins to find out the basics of building a website with WordPress but is now getting overwhelmed trying to juggle multiple hats of making pies, promoting her services, and building her website.
Mary is getting mentally drained but doesn’t want to give up just yet on her plan. She decides she’s going to look into getting help with this one task so she can focus on her pies, because that’s what she really wants to do.
The following school event she attends she brought her pies and began selling them. Today she actually meets another parent who is actually a web developer.
What a God send!
She tells him about the trouble she has been having trying to put up her site and she just needs some help implementing some of the features she would like in order to take future orders easier.
Mark listens to her dilema and agrees to help her in her situation to help set up her online signup store front and to get it to a place where she can manage.
Mary is relieved and coordinates a meet time with Mark and now she is looking forward to having more time to focus on her delicious pies.
When she meets with Mark for the next couple of days, he has made suggestions and implemented features that will help drive her online presence up as well as a better experience for users to interact with her website and place orders, even on a mobile device.
Mary is not only amazed, but grateful of all the things Mark has helped with just to help her get started.
Mark has created her sit to be mobile friendly, with simple navigation for users to peruse through her site easily. He has also optimized it for search engines and of course a great design to cater to her target audience as well for users experience.
When Mark added these features to her site Mary was able to see an increase in sales in a matter of a few weeks.
Along with all the additions he mad he also taught some simple site maintenance routines to help her update her site with new content so she might continue to grow. Anything bigger or if she is trying to update her site he gave her his card for any future business ventures.
So as you can see with Mary’s story while mark focused on building her website she was able to focus on her apple pies.
The biggest take away that Mary gained from getting assistance from Mark the front end web developer was 3 things.
Time
Expertise
User Experience Design.
Any business or business person should look into these 3 things in regards to any endeavor. You wouldn’t hire a florist to get baked bread. You would go to the bakery who has been trained to bake bread properly and has been doing it for some time.
A simple idea conceived from the book “The Richest Man in Babylon”. In order for you to see your business or money grow its best to collaborate with those more skilled and knowledgeable in an area you are not familiar with.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not one for foregoing for a DIY project, but the time it will take you to learn what you need to know, you can save time, money, and energy. But hiring someone with months to years of web development expertise and experience can help tremendously so that you can focus on what you need to grow your business and become the expert in your field, like apple pies.