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Squarespace and Wix and Weebly, oh my! These simple website building tools offer easy drag-and-drop interfaces and can be great for startups, budding small businesses, or getting a side job off the ground. But DIY web building comes at a cost to your brand. We will dive into why, and point out another way for a business to create a website (even one on a budget).
A DIY website tool's templates are well designed. No doubt about that. But when businesses decide to take the "off-the-shelf" template approach and plug their content in, they're usually surprised. What they had envisioned ends up looking nothing like the beautiful website design they thought they had selected. Why?
That last bullet point is the most important. Your brand is not the round peg that can fit in the square hole. It is complex, it has a personality, it needs to live online and look its best, and it needs to be authentically you.
Using a pre-made template to build your website and hiring a professional to build a website both score you a website, right? Yes. In the same way, a McDouble and a filet mignon are both meat. A professionally built website will take more time, effort, involvement, and resources. But it will also get more leads and convert them to customers quickly, which pays back your investment. A templated DIY website tool is directionless more often than not. You really have to know what you are doing to make it work the way you want.
A custom, professionally built website allows you to control your own little corner of the internet. Your business has (or should have) a unique voice, look, attitude, story, needs, strategies, goals, etc. Templates assume all of this… and you know what they say about assuming. Your website can be the most powerful way to curate all of your uniqueness in one place. When you hire a pro to build your web pages, brand comes first. Your website is strategized, built, and designed based on your brand, your story, your customers, and how you need the site to perform.
Messaging and visuals need to work together and the flow of your web pages needs to turn a visitor into a lead or customer. The 3:30:3 rule breaks down how this happens:
You have three seconds to hook a visitor with a great first impression. The first impression = headline + visuals + a brief descriptor. Text needs to be concise and visuals need to be presented in an appealing way (can't overdo it or have too few, or be poorly presented). Get any of these elements wrong and the visitor might bail and never come back. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
If you managed to hook the visitor with a good first impression, you have 30 more seconds to keep them on your website. Upon scrolling, clicking, or tapping, the visitor needs to gain a deeper understanding of what you offer - why your product or service is better and unique. They're also looking to your website to answer their own questions. But this half-minute of education needs to be skimmable. People don't usually read everything on your web page. They will skim, scan, look for cues and context, and they will form quick opinions.
If you have kept the visitor on your site for more than 30 seconds, they are likely going to dive a little deeper. This is when they will look at more explanatory content, blog posts, videos, etc. In these three minutes, they are looking for social proof, deeper knowledge, and credentials that prove or validate what they learned in the first 30 seconds.
If you nail the 3:30:3 rule, you will probably have a lead, a returning visitor, or maybe even a customer. It is a very narrow window and not worth risking getting it wrong.