3 Benefits of Hiring A Squarespace Web Designer
Squarespace is a wonderful DIY website tool that places amazing functionality and customisation at your fingertips. However, in some circumstances, too much choice can be too much to handle and Squarespace becomes overwhelming, frustrating or even a bit scary.
This absolutely doesn’t have to be the case and I hope that my tutorial posts will help to answer some of your more common Squarespace dilemmas. But if you’re wondering if hiring a professional to take care of building your website for you is a good idea – I can assure you, it is!
I occasionally find myself explaining what I am able to bring to the table as a Squarespace web designer when people find out what I do for a living. Surely, if Squarespace is meant to be a tool for the layperson to build and run their own website, they’d be no reason to pay someone else to get involved, right? Wrong!
No matter how many Squarespace courses you take, tutorials you follow and videos you watch, there really is no substituting the benefits a web design professional will bring to you small business’ online presence. Here are three of them.
1. Unparalleled Expertise
As mentioned above, there is an absolute trove of tutorials, blog posts, youtube videos and courses out there to teach you how to use squarespace effectively. But nothing compares to a professional who works with the platform day in, day out when it comes to knowing what is possible for your website. What’s the best template? How can I display my products in categories? Is there a way to do X, Y and Z? Any and all of your questions should be able to be answered easily by an experienced and competent Squarespace designer. At the very least, they should be able to get back to you in a day or two if they need to research something a little out there or propose a suitable alternative.
The extra resources available to members of Squarespace Circle can also help you achieve a better web presence than you could build on your own. Professional designers share amongst themselves advice and have access to Squarespace themselves in a way the average user doesn’t – with a professional designer, you’ve got an inside man!
Squarespace aside, web design isn’t as easy as it looks. Every heard the old adage that teachers claim many parents think they know best just because they went to school? I don’t know about you, but just because you live in a house, doesn’t mean you should build one. Just because you drive a car, you likely wouldn’t trust yourself to repair it. And just because you use the internet, it doesn’t mean you can necessarily build a perfect website.
Hiring a professional will ensure that all the best practice rules of web design are followed. SEO, 301 redirects, footer links, optimised URL slugs. It might sound like Greek to some, but these are the bread and butter of a web designer who knows their stuff and it will pay off when it comes to your website, without you having to lift a finger.
2. Saves You Time and Makes You Money
How much time have you spent on your website already?
If you added up every hour you’ve spent switching templates, editing pages, switching blocks here and there, changing colours and styles and doing all the googling to figure out every little issue you come up against… how many hours or even days would that come to?
Now, how many clients could you have served in that time?
How much money could you have made in that time?
Even if you haven’t spent weeks trying to build a site yourself and are starting from scratch right now, think of all the things you could be doing with that time and what that time is worth to you. It not uncommon to hire a cleaning lady or a gardener, because the time and satisfaction you get back from not having to do those jobs yourself is worth the money you pay them. Hiring a web designer is exactly the same concept, but with an extra plus. The final product will MAKE you money! And a professionally designed and built site will make you more money than a homemade one, for sure.
Consider the price your chosen web designer is quoting and consider two things:
How much would you pay to get this ‘build a website’ job off your to-do list for good and have it done to an impeccable standard?
How many clients would that new website need to attract to pay for itself?
When I hired someone to re-do my branding a while after I had my business up and running, I was a little nervous about the investment but I knew that it would be a huge job for me to do myself and that I would rather spend that time doing other things, I knew that someone who was a branding guru would be able to do a better job than me and I figured it would take just one extra client for that branding to have paid for itself. An absolute no-brainer!
3. Outsourcing – yes please!
Outsourcing is a huge reason to pass your web design and build over to a professional. It takes a huge job off your plate when you likely have 101 other business tasks to put your mind to instead and you can relax knowing that an expert is taking care of it for you.
I started outsourcing in my business right from the start and it was a game changer for both my cash flow and my mindset. I am lucky enough to know myself really well and to know my strengths and be proud of them and able to utilise them to my advantage. When it came to taking the first steps in my business, I was confident I could build my own website (obviously), create content guides, do some basic graphic design and branding, take care of my own admin and do my own accounts. As a web design pro, I knew that visual content was going to need to be a big part of my brand identity but I also knew that I am in no way gifted with a camera, nor am I a natural in front of one. Within a couple of weeks of saying a stonking big YES to starting my own business, I had found and booked a session with a photographer to take care of this part of my business journey for me. And I can tell you, it was worth every single penny, even though I had to borrow the money or pay for it.
As new or growing business owners, it can be so tempting to feel we have to take care of all the things and do it standing on one leg while spinning plates too. Our pesky egos trip us up and convince us that if we want to build an online business we have to do it all by ourselves. Ask yourself though, does my ideal client need or want me to be good at web design? Probably not. Does my ideal client need or want me to have a solid, well designed, attractive and informative online presence? Yes. Certainly. Do they care if I built it myself? Um, no! Unless you’re a web designer, like me that is!. Of course, I built my own site. It is my biggest portfolio piece and my clients want to see a website with gorgeous images, but do my clients need me to be an insta-worthy photographer? Nope.
I want my potential new yoga teacher to know her ish when it comes to yoga and I want to be able to find out class times, location info and a bit of her personality on her website while having an easy and memorable user experience. Do I care if she built that site? NO. I want my yoga teacher to be sat zenned to the 100th degree while someone like me puts together that site for her so she can focus on what she does best… untangling me and calling an ambulance, probably.
Outsourcing is really just a way of saying yes to doing more of what you’re good at. These days, I have outsourced photography, my branding, some bits and pieces of social media and the occasional bit of coding when I have too much on my plate. Build your team and say yes to doing more of what makes you an expert.
