A Web Site is Your Online Representative
Would you build your brick and mortar shop and do all of the signs and interior decorating yourself? Most of us would not; we would hire professionals to give us the best image possible. Your web site acts as your business card and/or online shop. It acts as a direct representative of you and your business. If your web site doesn’t have the professional image you need, you are losing customers. If first impressions are so important, why would you want to scare your potential customers away in the first second?

Professionalism
When you hire a professional designer, not only do they know how to give you a beautiful image, but also how to give you the image that’s right for your business and industry. A skilled designer should know the 'in's and 'out's of marketing as well as creativity. An effective web site should be unique, be pleasant on the eye, have clear and easy navigation, load efficiently, and work properly in all the major browsers.

Saving Time
Hiring a professional web designer instead of making the web site yourself will save you a lot of time, energy, and frustration. There is a large learning curve in order to make effective web sites and there are many aspects to web development much beyond learning HTML which makes it a full time job. A professional web developers is skilled and up-to-date in several areas including Marketing, SEO, Communication, HTML, CSS, Photo Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Java Script, and possibly several other languages like Flash, PHP and others.

Getting Ahead of the Competition
As you may well know, competition is as fierce in the internet as it is in the physical world. If your competitors have a web presence before you do, they are already a step ahead of you. But, if you launch a new web site that is more effective than theirs, you will have the extra edge. Not only does a well-built web site give a good first impression, it also will give your customers a reason to trust your business over that of your competitors.

Uniqueness and Customization
There are about 56,000,000 web sites on the internet as of November 2004 according to netscape.com. How are you going to make yours stand out? Buying a nice template can be a quick and cheap solution, but you may risk having your web site look like several others. Furthermore, many features that you may require for your web site including contact forms, galleries, forums, and other special scripts are simply not available with pre-made templates. If you have a web site built with a pre-made template and in the future you want to expand it, you may have to rebuild the whole site again to include the added features that you need.

Communicating Your Message
A professional web designer is experienced in knowing how to properly communicate your message. They are skilled at marketing and are concerned, above all, with how to effectively communicate your message by organizing your information in a digestible manner as well as communicating your message through the use of colors, fonts, shapes, layouts, and more to convey the message you want to represent for your business.

Attention
A nice web site designed by a professional designer will bring attention to your business. Not only does a nice web site attract new customers, it will also bring professional attention from your peers or potential advertisers that you may be in search of. Word-of-mouth and good referrals are some of the most powerful marketing tools there are.

Search Engine Optimization
One of the most important factors about a web site is its presence in the search engines. It is useless to have the nicest web site in the world if it doesn’t have a good presence in the search engine listings. Good search engine ranking are important because they are usually the number one way potential customers will find you on the internet. They also act as a free and effective advertising tool. A professional web designer will know how to develop your web site to make it fair decently in search engine listings by building it search engine-friendly from the bottom up. This is the most effective and ethical way to insure top rankings for your web site.

Browser Compatibility
Browser incompatibility occurs when a web site doesn’t show the same way or appears “broken” to site visitors on different browsers. The reason for this is that different browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, etc.) have different standards for displaying web pages. What looks perfectly fine in one browser may show up as a jumbled mess in another. Professional web designers are skilled at knowing how to make web sites display properly on a variety of browsers. A good web designer will test and construct your web site across browsers, insuring that the majority of people on different browsers can see your web site the way it should be.

Making the Difference between Personal and Commercial Web Sites
There is a huge difference between a home page and a professional web site. It can take years of experience to learn how to build an effective commercial web site and it is something that is best left to an expert. Having a professional web site will provide you with a sense of security in your business that no home-made web site can do. Your web site will be something that thousands of people around the world may view every day. Make sure your web site shows what you want the world to see; a high-quality, clean, accessible, professional, and top ranking business.