Well, the time has come for your company to invest in a new web site. You’ve seen a few competitors with flashy sites, you’ve dabbled with a site of your own, but it just isn’t cutting it. Realistically you’re not sure exactly how much a site “should” cost, but like everyone else in the world you’d probably rather pay less than more. As you begin to research the idea of creating a new web site, someone will probably tell you about their brother-in-law who works at Best Buy and made a pretty nice looking site for someone he or she knows. I can say with great certainty that “Joe”, as we’ll call him, will offer to build your site for a significantly lower dollar amount than an agency can offer. Let’s explore now the dangers of following Joe into the treacherous waters of web development.
In a perfect world, Joe is a hard-coding genius who also happened to study graphic design for two years before deciding that Harvard Business School was the best path for his undergraduate studies. Joe is the best coder, designer and customer relations man in the area and just loves seeing his clients succeed. But we don’t live in a perfect world. While Joe may be a talented coder, designer and businessman, it’s highly unlikely that he is a professional in all of these trades. At an agency, you work with a team of individuals who each has his or her own specialty. In an agency, each one of us is accountable not only to our clients, but to each other. If the designer doesn’t do his or her job on time, it puts the coders behind. If the account manager treats a customer badly, he or she must report to their boss. Joe doesn’t have that accountability.
All too many times we’ve had clients tell us that Joe built their web site a couple of years ago, and now because he has a new job, family or any other number of reasons, Joe is now virtually unavailable. Employees may leave agencies, but good agencies don’t go anywhere. There is something to be said for the security of having the people who built your web site in the same building every day from 8 to 5. You know where they are. You know how to get a hold of them. And you know that they’ll be around if you need them.
At Anchor our number one goal is to help our clients succeed. We approach every web site with a background in strategic marketing. We do it right the first time. So when it comes time to build your site, remember that while Joe can be attractive, working with an agency like Anchor has its own rewards: confidence, communication and the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you are offering the right message to the right target market.
