Imagine you’re looking to hire a construction company to build your dream home. You need a company who will build your home to code, use quality materials, and hire workers with the requisite skills.
You find a firm that offers a good price but they try to convince you that it’s OK to skip the design-blueprint phase and that the only laborers needed to build your home are two carpenters and a painter. You wisely run in the other direction.
You wouldn’t hire a home builder that didn’t have the full set of skills needed to build your home. Yet every day, companies hire web developers that have only a fraction of the skills needed to build an effective website.
Two skills that are ubiquitous (and found at almost every web design firm) are graphic design and coding. A website built leveraging only these two skills may seem OK at first – but it could have a major failing — it doesn’t engage your customers or persuade them to buy.
Over the last two decades, I’ve worked on digital marketing campaigns and websites for mega brands as well as start-ups and small, local businesses. The good news is, you don’t have to have a six-figure website budget to leverage the same sound marketing strategies used by big brands. You simply need to understand each of the 10 essential skills needed in the development of an effective website.
This white paper boils each skill down into its most elemental state, with a brief description of the activities involved and how each role contributes to the whole. I hope that this knowledge will help you make the best possible decision for your brand and your company’s future growth.
By Doug Burton
