Why You Should Hire A Professional Web Design Agency in 2021

Why You Should Hire A Professional Web Design Agency in 2021?

Do You Remember AltaVista Search Engine?

On December 15, 1995 AltaVista was publicly launched as an Internet Search Engine by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who later, through various acquisitions and mergers became Compaq followed by Hewlett-Packard. (All of whom some of our developers have worked for). DEC research staff Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea, along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web Crawler and Indexer. AltaVista became one of the most popular early search engines but started to lose ground after 1998 when Google was released and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003.

So why are we taking a nostalgic look at search engines’ past? Well simply put, AltaVista did not move fast enough to beat off the competition and subsequently sold out to Yahoo, and today Yahoo! Search Engine is now powered by Bing (Microsoft Corporation).

With the ongoing COVID pandemic throughout the world, businesses have increasingly taken to working remotely. As we progress into and throughout 2021, the online and remote ways of working will only increase as the world continues to battle with this dreadful pandemic. No matter what kind of business you run, whether that is as an individual self-employed person, a small, or medium enterprise or a large corporation, there are modern ways to either get online, improve your online presence and engage with your customers to ultimately increase business and online conversions.

There is no time like the present to get ahead of the game with your website or web app. With a modern approach to web design and development you can achieve greater returns and ultimately turn an unpleasant global situation into an online success.

To achieve this goal of online success, Rokit Media have put together our top 5 reasons why we think you should hire a professional web design agency in 2021.

#1 Bespoke Personalised Website Design

How many websites are there in the world in January 2021? So, we have done some research, and the results as of January 4 2021 were: approximately 1.83 billion websites on the internet! That figure includes inactive websites; however, it is estimated up to 400 million websites are active and by the time you have finished reading this article thousands of new websites will have been deployed.

According to W3Techs, as of December 1 2020, WordPress powers 39.5% of all the websites on the Internet. You only have to perform a simple Google search “WordPress Themes” to see a plethora of blog posts suggesting the “Most Popular” and “Best Themes” used on WordPress websites.

What this essentially suggests is that a large proportion of WordPress sites are commonly using the same style and design for their website presence. If you want to convey your brands individuality and style, why would you choose the same outfit as thousands of other sites? Perhaps, it is based on cost? This is a false economy as in the long run it will ultimately cost you more in lost revenue if you do not appeal to your audience.

Although it may sometimes seem cost efficient to choose common or DIY web design platforms using their off- the-shelf templates and styles, that cost effectiveness is lost from day one of going live with your new website!

For this reason, we believe hiring a professional web design agency to build your online presence will save you money in the longer term. Professional web design agencies can offer a unique approach to the design and style of your website and utilise modern efficient styling frameworks to achieve an overall brand awareness without compromise.

Here at Rokit Media we work with you, your brand and your vision to create bespoke website designs that communicate a spirit of uniqueness. We use modern website design techniques and apply a mobile first and responsive practice to all website projects to keep you ahead of the game in website design and development technology.

#2 DIY Website Designers will have Limitations

Design, style and individuality with a bespoke website design alone will not make my online presence and business a success, I could just use an Online DIY Website Design Tool like Wix or Squarespace with simple drag and drop tools, couldn’t I?

That is true and yes you could use one of the DIY Website Design or Website Builder tools available. There is no one-size-fits-all or defined singular solution, you should consider all your requirements and goals before planning on the best solution for your website project.

You can guarantee that all the popular DIY Website Designers provide the basics like Content Management Systems (CMS), Drag & Drop design, Themes & Templates… However, you should scrutinise your choice of web design tools and platforms and ensure it meets or provides the following key requirements for any online website or web app success.

• Speed, Performance and Page Load Times
• Structured Data Mark-Up
• Security Best Practices
• Responsive Layout Design Elements
• Search Engine Optimisation and Best Practices
• Image Optimisation and Lazy Loading
• Designing with A Mobile First Approach
• Progressive Web App (PWA) Capability
• Modern Styling Frameworks
• Minified Code & Styles
• Component Based Architecture

These are just a handful of key areas that need to be considered to deliver a high-performing modern website or web app. These are specialist areas that are currently not fully or not at all adopted by the popular DIY Web Design platforms.

Taking all the above into consideration, and as not to be left behind in such a fast, digital modern age, we believe that you need to hire a Professional Web Design Agency.

#3 Faster Page Load Times & Improved Performance

So, we briefly mentioned “Speed, Performance and Page Load Times” as a key consideration in the previous section. Why is Performance so important in 2021?

Mobile internet usage has progressively worked its way into our daily lives, stop and think for a moment how many times you browse the internet on your Mobile device compared with your desktop-based usage. According to Statista post in 2019, the global mobile population amounted to 4 billion unique users and mobile devices accounted for 48 percent of web page views worldwide in 2019, and global mobile data traffic is projected to increase nearly sevenfold between 2017 and 2022.

With so many Mobile users, speed is now of the upmost importance, internet users want content delivered fast and direct, especially when browsing over slower mobile networks such as 3G. Google is also now reportedly applying Search Engine Results with performance in mind and at the forefront. Therefore, if your website does not perform well you can expect to start falling down the rankings or not even climb them when it comes to Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and your website’s position, no matter how good your on-page or off-page SEO tactics are.

At Rokit Media Faster Page Load Times & Improved Performance are always at the front of our thoughts throughout the design and development phases of any project. We apply modern design and development techniques and continually review new and progressive technologies to make available to our customers. Do you have the skills, knowledge or time to apply modern techniques and performance enhancements to your own website? Or do you need to get on with your businesses primary function in order to generate healthy revenues? Hence why you should Hire A Professional Web Design Agency in 2021.

#4 Responsive Designs

We have touched on the Mobile Internet subject surrounding speed, however there are so many mobile devices available now with different screen sizes and even foldable screens such as Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold. How do we cater for all these devices?

Rokit Media supports this multitude of varying devices by designing with a mobile first approach and applying a responsive web design that automatically adjusts for different screen sizes and viewports. Responsive designs also need to consider image sizes and adopt techniques to display different image sizes based on the device it is being rendered on, which ideally needs a variation of sizes for the same image and displayed on the corresponding viewport.

Can your DIY Website Designer Tool manage variations in image sizes for a responsive design? Maybe it’s time to Hire A Professional Web Design Agency in 2021?

#5 Professional Support if Things go Wrong

What if I messed something up in my design or code? What if my web server or other hosting platform goes down? Why is it so slow? Why can my customers not access it on their mobile phone?

If you have attempted to build your own website from scratch with minimal knowledge and something goes horribly wrong with your code after an update to a live site. How are you going to fix it? Well, you will probably spend a lot of time trying to fix the issues and during this time you will be losing customers.

Did you develop your site using modern development methodologies? Are you applying a continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment method to your website builds? Is your code in a Source Code Repository and could you possibly roll back a deployment to back out of a problem? Not to mention if your web server has an underlying fault in the Linux operating system, do you have the required skills to fix this?

So many questions… This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to supporting a website and its hosting infrastructure. With an online Website Designer Tool your supplier will manage your website’s infrastructure, however they will not fix your website’s code if you make mistakes. If they do, there could possibly be an unexpected charge for this service.

Yes, it can be rather daunting, and people can sometimes underestimate how much is involved in designing, deploying and maintaining a successful website, but don’t be put off there is a simple solution, Hire A Professional Web Design Agency in 2021!

Team Rokit