How to sell a custom design solution over a Web Builder

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Your potential client says to you they are consideringusing a site builder.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

How on earth do you compete with a £9.99 a month service used by millions of small businesses.

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Episode 24: Selling a custom website and 7 reasons why not to use a site builder

service

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Are these really your potential clients?

✓ The clients you should be looking for are ones that value your work, your process and want to work with you.

✓ Are these lower budget clients who you want to work with?

✓ These types of clients can cause more problems than good.

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What is a site builder?

✓ A service like 1 and 1 mysites

✓ wix.com

✓ Weebly.com

✓ SquareSpace seems to be the best of these as it does offer customisation to a degree anyway. Heard good thing about this service.


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✓ Seo can be a very complicated game, with site structure, linking, meta information and craw-ability particularly effected by a site builders. As well as performance which i will get onto.

✓ Many clients care about SEO and even alone mentioning that a site builder can hurt chances of ranking high can be enough to make them rethink their cheaper strategy.

1. Search Engine Rankings

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✓ Does your client really want a site that looks like many others on the web?

✓ Or do they want something custom built and crafted from the ground up?

✓ Sell to your client that they will be proud of their new site and not something copied from another market.

✓ Show them your portfolio and ask them to find anything similar, in 99% of cases they will not be able to and you may win them over on uniqueness.

2. Cookie Cutter


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✓ Site Builders don’t accommodate Web Fonts which give an improvement to the reading and branding experience of a custom built site.

✓ With 000’s of new fonts available it’s a wasted opportunity.

✓ TypeKit is my preference in libraries although some of Google’s completely free fonts are impressive.

3. Web Fonts

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✓ Support from some of these bigger companies are renowned for being patchy and poor.

✓ Not tarring everyone with the same brush but you are more dealing with telephone staff than of web hosting and design experts.

✓ Smaller companies can give more tailored and custom support in my experience.

4. Support


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✓ Many clients content is unique and you are ramming content in places not design exactly for that specific content, whether that be images of varying size, large text, downloads, audio.

✓ Sticking and not crafting the important content can make or break a site.

5. Shoehorn

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6. Site Performance

✓ I take site performance very seriously and so should you. Google also nows sees site loading times as a factor in their algorithm.

✓ Many areas of site performance are thrown out the window with a site builder.

✓ Very easy for a client to add in a 3 megabit image and wonder why the site page takes a while to load.

✓ With a custom solution in the case of Media Surgery- we would use ExpressionEngine with clear instructions on use and auto resizing and quality of image set.

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✓ Many of these site builders don’t have the flexibility to scale with features such as image galleries, e-commerce and custom content.

✓ You are restricted to what you are given rather than an blank canvas with endless possibilities with a custom solution.

7. No flexibility to scale with features.


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✓ Whilst these 7 points will really help you sell a custom solution sometimes people are just in the market for cheap. You need to let them go.

✓ There is also an opportunity to get a solution like SquareSpace and customise it for the client. A half way house between custom and drag and drop. A lot less expense for the client whilst still keeping you busy. Personally i love and firmly believe in crafting client businesses from the ground but there is a market for that.

The One Thing To Take Away(Tottta)


How to sell a custom design solution over a Web Builder

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