If you have ever talked to a professional cook about what takes their meals to the next level of success, there is a phrase that you will hear them repeat over and over again – ‘presentation, presentation, presentation’. All other things being equal, the quality of their dishes is a given, but how they feed your eyes as well as your taste buds makes a huge psychological different to the experience of a diner. The same idea pertains to websites, in a parallel manner. All things being equal, as someone who browses web pages, are you more likely to appreciate information that is presented in a static, flat format, or presented colorfully, dynamically, and aesthetically?
First, Start with Great Content
Take one step back, though, and remember that though presentation is important, content is king. Colorful, well-designed nonsense is still nonsense. But, when you have legitimate information about a topic, especially important matters like medicine, legal issues, financial matters, or health matters, and then package it in a way that shows that you care – then you are starting to head down the path to online success with regard to marketing and client outreach.
Consider Learning to Create Your Own Small Website First
In order to avoid behind overwhelmed by technology and lingo used by web designers and developers, take some time to build your own website. Take something like WordPress and follow along with a few tutorials. In as little as a few hours, you will begin to understand more about how data flow works, how FTP functions, and how design elements essentially wrap around the bits of code that make information transmission work. You’ll also learn the basics of linking, search engine optimization, and writing headlines, headers, and metadata.
When It Really Matters, Hire the Professionals
Now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to hire professionals to do your coding and design. It can take years to become totally comfortable and efficient coding websites, and it takes certain inherent talent to be a web designer. Find people who fit in these categories and pay them what they are worth. You can save yourself hundreds of hours of frustration simply by paying industry professionals to do their jobs. It is good to know the language and operation on a small scale, which is why you should build your own small site first, but in order to compete against major players, you need to even out the playing field by hiring the best you can afford. These types of decisions can begin making your online presence profitable almost instantly, rather than having to troubleshoot your coding and design issues along the way, while still trying to provide great content.