What's the first thing you'd ask when hiring a web designer? How much he charges perhaps? Well, all of us are hard-wired to get value for our hard-earned money, so it’s understandable if you want to hire someone who’s cheap. Indeed, price wars are a major challenge for web design in Malaysia.
One thing’s for sure, cheap web design isn’t really all that cheap. In fact, it can be the most expensive sort of web design out there! How is this so? Well, you might very well save a few bucks in the beginning for hiring a cheap web designer, but the truth is that the design is very likely being done by a freelancer or student.
The downside to this is that he’s probably a ‘one man show,’ doing practically everything from design to programming, domain to hosting, support to communication, and all this on top of his regular job or studies.
The biggest worry with depending on a one man show is that he might very well disappear overnight, or can’t be easily reached when he’s sick or out of town. There’s also the big possibility of a slow turnaround time and you might even have to do a lot of chasing and follow up, which takes up a lot of your resources.
One of the worst things that can happen, of course, is a low quality outcome. A bad web design can very well ruin your corporate image. I mean, if you have an ugly-looking website, you’re probably better off without one! This, in turn, might put off potential customers and drive them away from your business. Very bad indeed.
If you do some calculation at this point, you can probably estimate how many customers you might lose due to a poorly designed website. This means you’ll have no choice but to redo the whole thing again and spend even more of that hard-earned cash. A website is supposed to be a long-term investment, not a long-term expense! It should be properly set up to help a company increase online visibility, reach more customers and therefore increase sales while cutting down marketing costs etc.
That’s why we see our work as a subtle science and exact art. Other web designers might create a website that's good looking and that's all, but really, there are a multitude of points to take into consideration. Besides looking good, a website must also be: search engine friendly (as SEO can help increase a website’s ranking and thus attract more visitors); able to convert visitors into prospective customers; easy to navigate (especially for an informational website such as a company profile or product catalogue); user friendly; and compatible to all operating systems, browsers and platforms (e.g. IE, Firefox and Google Chrome).
In short, we not only create websites that look good, but they work beautifully too! This requires not only a lot of knowledge, skill and experience, but also a good team. At Orangesoft, our team comprises of award-winning web designers, top-notch web application developers, elite software engineers, senior system analysts, php specialists, drupal cms specialists, trendy internet marketers and many more!
In order to justify if something is ‘cheap’ or ‘expensive,’ it really is the value that you should be looking at, not merely the price. If you create a website for just RM100, but that website doesn’t help your company in any way, or is even ruining your image and turning customers away, it’s much better for you to create a RM10,000 website that brings you RM20,000 worth of business. Now that’s cheap!
If you’re about to hire someone, just bear this old Chinese proverb in mind, “Cheap things are not good, good things are not cheap!”