As technology grows ever more necessary for businesses to reach their audiences, technology companies try to offer solutions for non-technical people so that they can create their own websites. Intuit's website building software or 1 & 1 My Website are the 2 most common sites that you may recognize. For all of the advertising these companies spend to market and raise awareness for their website building solutions, the actual products fall short of graphical, structural, and functional design for most businesses. The best example is my last client, Austin Simply Fit. They began their website with one of these solutions and after they spent countless hours setting it up and then trying to design it within the software's construct they reached an unsatisfactory result.
A business website is the most effective piece of marketing material a business has to sell itself to its audience and keep them informed. Why go with and settle for a solution with an less than excellent result? Companies like Intuit have a very strong brand name from products like Quickbooks and compared to the painstaking process of seeking out, vetting, and hiring a web designer or web developer, the Intuit brand name persuades people to use their product. Most of the time, these out-of-the-box type solutions yield a less than adequate means for a business to properly communicate ideas, services, and information to an audience.
When a web designer and web developer like myself encounter solutions like 1 & 1 My Website or Intuit Website Solutions they are a real let-down from a design, structural, and functional aspect. Web technology and web programming has to be exact down to the very last punctation mark, yet at the same time it needs to be flexible enough because some pieces of code will conflict with other pieces of code and then you have to debug it to make it work together. The problems with the out-of-the-box solutions, is that they DO NOT allow for flexibility in the layout code (CSS - Cascading Style Sheets) or functional code (programming) and therefore the user who is trying to design the layout will always end up with a bad graphical representation and a user who needs to add a functional database will not be able to do so.
If you are a small business owner and you want a website that will go the distance, the best option you have is to find a web designer or web developer and let them guide you towards a viable solution for your business. If websites consist of 3 moving parts: 1 part business, 1 part art, and 1 part technology- and you want your website to look good, work well, and convey the right information to your audience- you need to reconsider all your options and find a great technology expert, like Gennovacap Technology Services, to help you implement the best solution for your business.
