We are currently living in a world that is rapidly conducting most of its business online. This means that everyone, including medical professionals need a website. This website will allow you to showcase your specialties, reach a bigger audience, and demonstrate your medical abilities. That being said, you should not treat getting your website as a DIY project. Here is why:
1. The creation of a quality website is art
Creating and designing a presentable website can be best described as art. Incorporating aspects like Bootstrap and JavaScript may be asking too much of a novice coder. An experienced web designer will do it easily and may add their unique elements to it. As a medical professional, you may struggle to add finer details to your site, which won’t make it as appealing as you’d like.
2. Lack of technical support and security
The existence of enablers such as website templates will give you the illusion that web design is easy. You’ll insert images and write a couple of lines of text, and you’ll be done. Although simple, the process will make your medical website to be insecure, and you won’t apply the technical aspects of web design. By hiring a web designer, they’ll bring your ideas and designs to life and incorporate the necessary security features. It will also benefit you as the web designer will solve any technical problems that arise. Also, see “The 6 Reasons a Template Website is a Bad Idea“.
3. Waste of Your time in the long run
While the appeal of building your website in a few hours is attractive, a quality website takes time to develop. Saving a few minutes will be costly, as your site is a marketing and informative platform. You should also note that learning the finer aspects of web design takes time that would have been better suited to run your business.
Building a website is time-consuming, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of web design and development. While DIY website builders promise a quick and easy solution, the reality is that you’ll likely spend countless hours trying to create a website that meets your needs and expectations. This involves the initial setup and ongoing maintenance, updates, and troubleshooting – all tasks that a professional could handle more efficiently. Moreover, these hours spent on website development could be better utilized in focusing on your core business operations, strategy, and growth. By hiring a professional website design firm, you’re paying for their expertise and the convenience of having a team handle all aspects of your website. At the same time, you concentrate on what you do best – taking care of your patients.
Pros and cons of custom GI websites
4. Limited customization
Website templates cannot be customized. They are very basic, and most are static. By outsourcing the web design process, you get the benefit of adding extra features and additional content.
While DIY website builders can seem attractive due to their user-friendly interface and pre-made templates, they fall short in customization. These platforms offer limited customization options, forcing businesses to fit into predefined boxes that may not adequately represent their unique brand or service offerings. For example, you may want to implement specific features or functionalities to enhance your users’ experience, but the builder’s constraints could make this impossible. Also, the templates provided are used by numerous businesses, meaning your website risks appearing generic or similar to others. When you opt for a professional web development service, you get a tailor-made website designed and developed to cater to your business needs and stand out from the competition.
5. It won’t look professional or convey your brand
Designing a website as a DIY project will result in a rather simple website. If you choose to use an experienced web developer will make it look professional and promote your brand.
DIY websites often lack the professional appearance that is critical for building credibility and trust with potential clients or customers. The limited design options, stock images, and generic templates provided by many DIY website builders can result in an amateurish or unpolished website. On the other hand, a professionally designed website has a unique layout, custom graphics, and high-quality images, all of which can create a more appealing and professional visual experience for visitors. Furthermore, professional web developers understand the importance of a cohesive visual brand, and they can design your website to reflect your brand identity accurately and compellingly.
6. Limited capability for Search Engine Optimization
You don’t have access to the core aspects of your medical website by using templates. This makes it rather hard to optimize your site for search engines.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is critical for increasing your website’s visibility on search engines, but DIY website builders often poorly handle it. These platforms usually provide only basic SEO tools and do not offer the advanced features necessary for optimal website ranking. They may lack features for customizing URLs, adding meta tags, creating XML sitemaps, or optimizing page speed. All of these are crucial for improving search engine rankings. Furthermore, DIY builders don’t typically guide you in developing an SEO strategy, researching keywords, or creating SEO-friendly content. On the other hand, professional web developers incorporate advanced SEO features into your website and ensure that it’s structured and coded in a way that is easy for search engines to read and rank. They can also guide you in creating an effective SEO strategy, ensuring your website reaches the right audience.
Search Engine Optimization by O360.
7. Poor analytics
Most website templates use older scripting technologies that offer inaccurate site analytics. DIY website builders often offer basic analytics or integrate with platforms like Google Analytics. Still, they generally lack advanced analytics features that would give you a deeper understanding of your visitors’ behavior. Understanding who your users are, where they come from, what actions they take on your site, and at what point they exit is crucial for making data-driven decisions to optimize your site and improve user experience. These builders often don’t provide insights into bounce rates, conversion funnels, user flow, or event tracking. In contrast, professional web development services can implement comprehensive analytics tools that provide these crucial insights and more. They can also set up custom tracking for specific goals, helping you measure the exact ROI of your website.
8. Who is going to write the content?
Building a website as DIY will mean that you have to devote your time to updating content such as blogs and events. Hiring a web designer will take this extra work off your hands.
DIY website builders often fall short when it comes to conveying the specialty of your profession, such as medical, legal, or engineering fields. These platforms can handle generic content well, but when it comes to showcasing the nuances, terminologies, and specific needs of specialized fields, they are not equipped to do so effectively. A professionally developed website, on the other hand, allows you to create tailored content that informs your audience and highlights your expertise and the unique aspects of your specialty. Professional developers and copywriters have the skills to present this specialty content in a user-friendly way that appeals to both industry professionals and laypeople, thus ensuring your website speaks effectively to all visitors.
Get professional medical content from o360.
9. Technology is always changing
Technology is always changing. As you build your site as a DIY project, you must learn some aspects of coding. When you are well conversant with these techniques, newer and better ones will be used. Hire an experienced web designer who won’t struggle to incorporate these new techniques.
The world of web technology is continually evolving, with new trends, tools, and best practices emerging regularly. DIY website builders can struggle to keep up with these changes, often resulting in outdated websites or lacking the latest functionalities. Features like responsive design, advanced SEO practices, accessibility standards, and integration with the latest APIs are crucial for modern websites but can be difficult to implement properly on a DIY platform. A professional web development service stays current with the latest technological trends and can incorporate these into your website. This ensures your site remains contemporary, functional, and user-friendly, providing an optimal user experience regardless of the device or platform they are using.
10. You’ll build a website for yourself, not your audience
By using a DIY approach, you will design the site to fit what you think is best. The resulting final product
Considering the above reasons, you are better off contacting Optimized360 today, and we will build the site to your specifications.
There’s a growing set of tools out there for building your website, and we understand that these options make going out on your own and doing a DIY website seem like a good plan. Unfortunately, the aforementioned website is often just a single page, and there’s far more to designing an effective website than adding some words, slapping up a few photos, and using a carbon-copy template website to design a page that looks like all the others. Here are just a few reasons you shouldn’t use a DIY website builder for your business.
Most DIY website providers use a standardized set of template website themes, with examples seen in Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and the ever-present WordPress. While the default themes can be used for personal blogs, they’re ineffective for business platforms. Your dental or medical practice is unique, and its website should be too. Even if the DIY site offers 500 templates, you’re sharing your design with approximately 180,000 other sites. Not optimal for standing out in a crowd.
11. Unprofessional And Unpolished
It goes without saying that these DIY sites lack the polish of a professionally designed website and that professionalism is what’s going to instill confidence in your site visitors and lend them a sense of credibility. Half of all website visitors have indicated that an amateurish feel to a website severely impacts their ability to trust the website, with 94% of them indicating they wouldn’t use the website or the associated company as a result. There’s no replacement for professional website design and effective branding. And with DIY websites, guess who writes the content? You do. Have you written compelling text that attracts and leads a prospective patient to engage? This doesn’t even address the issue of writing content that is SEO-friendly too. Leave this to the pros, like the expert marketers and designers at Optimized360.
12. Limitations of the number of pages
Most DIY website providers strictly limit the number of pages you can have on your website, which becomes a problem when you consider that a good website and SEO design states that you should have a different page for each practice, procedure, or service your medical practice offers. This limitation makes it harder to contact your intended audience and clearly describe how you can meet their needs.
13. Not mobile responsive
With most website visits coming from a mobile device, having a website that isn’t mobile responsive is a major handicap. Most DIY websites don’t support mobile responsive design, impacting your website’s navigability and adding an unprofessional and unpolished look that leaves a poor taste in your visitors mouths. Further, non-mobile responsive websites tend to load slower on mobile devices and use more data, which is not a great way to endear yourself to new visitors. See our mobile web design capability.
When you need a unique and polished original website design implementing your custom images and content, find a professional website design company like O360 to work with. Your medical or dental practice should have a website you can be proud of with an exclusive design that gives you every SEO advantage available to aid in serving your growing community of clients.
