No website project should take three to six months if you're talking with a company that can't do start to finish your website in eight to ten weeks then their company that's not up to the job. Welcome to we are slam show where we share insights ideas and best practices to help your business or brand grow. My name is Tyler Kelly I'm here with my co-host Michael T Johnson and today we are revealing the top five things that you need to look out for before you spend money. A building or redesigning your website, if you're looking to have a website design agency or services developed there are a couple of things you want to look out for and we've learned firsthand from experiences of people. We know that have had a bad experience with web design, so first, off you got to realize that your website sometimes and it's your lifeline to sales and revenue and if you hire the wrong person and they don't understand that they can actually break your like main thing for generating revenue. So we've heard horror stories from our own clients about their bad experiences in trying to develop websites in the past, so we have a client that we help on the storytelling side and they had a website. The basic website did everything they really needed it to do but they met somebody one of those friends, of kind of deals where they were going to trade this for helping them improve their website they made a lot of promises so they could do it. A couple of months later they have a broken website that's not generating leads and they've lost revenue because they can't drive the sales. They used to drive on their inferior website before that web designer and got a hold of it and I think when he asked her about it you know after was broken she was like I couldn't fix it. She couldn't fix it and I was just like she was in over her head. 

Sometimes people know all the right things to say, but they don't know how to execute and it reminds me of a company that we're working in with right now, to reshape their online story with web and digital and they spent and this is a small home services company. This isn't a big you know the multinational brand or medium-sized business. This is a local home services company that spent upwards of $40,000 on multiple variations and multiple versions of their website and when they came to us their website looked like something out of 1998 it was that bad and just our jaws dropped because we're like you spent how much over the last several years on website development and it looks like

this. So today's video is important if you're looking to build a website for your brand, if it's the first time or if you're looking to redesign a website for your company, this is the video for you right and you want to do it the first time because from those stories if you try to save money, you're gonna end up paying for it two or three times just to fix the problems and from trying to save money the first time. So there are five things you need to look out for. The first one is you can just look at their website. Does the company or person you're wanting to hire actually have a website? Does it work? Does it function the way it's supposed to? Anything broke someone's own website as pretty good evidence of whether they can do the job. Think about does that website do and this is super low you know. The bar is really low at the look at their website, because at first you just want to make sure that it works and that it works in all the places. Where it should work? You know like mobile phones, tablets, desktop, and that it does the things that a regular website. This year should be doing. You know if it looks like

something that is five or ten years old.

Expect them to build something that looks like it's from this era right, so number one looks at their website so the next point. Number two is you get what you pay for now, we kind of talked about this and you don't want to pay for something more than once. To fix issues, and the question that you need to ask is what are you really paying for so in today's day and age with CMS's like WordPress and what the builders out

there like Squarespace and can job' and templates and themes that exist in the marketplace. Are you really paying for web design services and development anymore? I would argue not necessarily like most acceptable good website frameworks have already been created and the process of creating a website or designing a web site is not really about how that's put together or coded because there's already an acceptable pattern and way of doing that, but it's more about how does the information that I put on the page communicate and convey my brand position. My messages in order to accomplish the goals that I want my website to accomplish, so what are you paying for, and really what you want to pay for is that expertise. Apart from just the bare-bones and building of the site like you said. We have all those things so we've seen a couple of extremes and in this so, for one there's this idea maybe in the past of like this pixel-perfect beautifully designed website and those things have their places. But for most businesses, it doesn't make any sense so a case in point I will put ourselves in the hot seat. We built ourselves one of these websites and once we spent a lot of time on it, it was really beautiful, and it did all this really cool. 

Parallax stuff, it was like a piece of art and it was gonna win awards and we had it up for what may be a week and we were like you know

this doesn't make any sense. Nobody knows how to use it, it's not gonna generate sales for us and basically just existed for ourselves to pat ourselves on the back and for creating something that looked really cool. They add the ad world would have loved it and had we left it up long

enough for them to see it but we decided that driving sales via the website was more important than winning awards right. Average web designers won't even understand and those people can be very expensive and they can create some really cool things but that also doesn't

have a place. For most of us, I would say 99% of us you'll spend a lot of money on something that potentially could be lacking in design and also it's just way. Overkill for your technical needs and for your business, for the most part, there's a third-party app and plug-in. There's

something out there that already does what you needed to do as a smaller medium-sized business. If you do have a six-figure website budget and you want to create something completely from scratch that's when it's time to look at custom development and custom coding, but

for most of the people tuning into this video right now, you're not in that place and you don't need to be so. You don't need to be seeking out developers of that caliber, so essentially you have like super great design with no coding ability. No user experience ability. then you have

like super coder user experience but no design and then maybe if you're like well just so. where what we should do is just meet in the middle and if you have an agency or a company or a firm or you know somebody, you know work, now their home and that is a great designer and a great developer. Still might not be what you're looking for because what you need is somebody or an organization that can frame your marketing message in a way that drives results and that's through design, that's through user experience, and it's through copywriting

and information architecture right.

The third point which does they understand marketing and sales? So a lot of people build websites or marketers and they don't really understand the sales process or their real-world bits and pieces. How you actually make money and drive revenue for your business. We've talked a lot in recent episodes, about marketing and sales alignment and I think that you know in a previous world marketing and sales were siloed but today, in order for things to happen at the speed at which we need them to happen. You need to align your marketing and sales departments and what that means is, if you're going to create a marketing piece like a website it needs to accomplish sales goals. You need to have a sell. Make the case of a sale for the website and so the teams have to get together, you have to hire an agency or a firm or consultant that understands marketing and sales in order to bring those two worlds together into a piece of collateral. Into an interactive experience that drives sales. So fourth question needs to ask does the agency, the company, the person, you're working with do they offer a turnkey solution? So when you think about a website that may seem like one thing, but it's a lot of things. It's hosting its information architecture it's copywriting its design and it can be video strategy. I mean the list is pretty long of all the things you and need for a website that does exactly. What you need to drive sales to drive revenue and function for all your marketing purposes. I mean you need to figure out do they understand my business and can that understanding translate to the web and like Michael said, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes and we mentioned design and coding and user experience and SEO. All that stuff, but then there's all the technical like there are security and you

know how the weight of a page.