Looking to build a website for your business? You have been warned.
Somebody I know had her company’s site done by one of those companies selling Joomla or WordPress ‘packages’. When she saw the end result, she face-palmed. When I saw it, my reaction was pretty much the same. The site was riddled with horrid mix of serif and sans-serif font, bad alignment, varying font sizes, etc.
For about $2,000-$3,000 dollars you can have these people build you a Joomla or WordPress site, but you really pay only about $800 for it because the government is helping you pay the other 60%, or about $1,200 via the Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC).
No, this is not a blog entry to advertise the PIC. There’s rampant abuse of the PIC scheme, and it has actually created a lot of crappy work (and IMHO, crappy jobs). Not to mention photocopiers selling for $15,000 with “cashback”.
A lot of these web “design” companies are selling you nothing but pre-built templates reused over and over again. No surprise all their client’s websites look pretty much the same. With some changes to color and images, bingo! They’ve transformed the template into your website.
But wait… it still looks like crap. Why?
A lot of ‘designers’ are really just ‘developers’. Designers come from art school. Developers come from IT school. A lot of these designer-developers don’t even understand basic typography, let alone color theory, or help you with illustration or photography. And if they aren’t good in English, expect your site to be riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.
When you engage a proper web design firm you actually are paying for a lot of things. A good company will actually advise you on the kind of content or site structure you should have, and also be able to provide additional services like copywriting, photography, illustration, etc. A proper design firm needs to hire both designers and developers, and they’ll also need somebody to manage these two very different groups of people and ensure they don’t kill each other.
If you are really looking for a cheap solution you can actually buy beautiful templates off sites like Template Monster for a fraction of the money, then engage a freelancer to help you add content and deploy it to a hosting provider.
You’ll want to choose a template with the similar color theme and typography as your corporate brand. You don’t want to mess with colors or fonts — that’s a job for designers.
Nowadays the first impression people have of your company is through your website. Don’t underestimate the impact a website might have on your business. Messing a website up is as good as messing with the signboard and interior design of a retail shop.
One final word of advise — make sure you get a company that can support you through upgrades and security patches of the CMS you use (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) preferably one that provides hosting service as part of the package. Most people with Joomla sites built a few years back would have had their site ‘hacked’ by now due to security issues (I’ve dealt with a lot of these cases). If you must, choose WordPress. It’s better than Joomla in terms of security.
It’s really 一分钱一分货.