As a teacher business owner, you know how important it is to use strong visuals in your branding . It only makes sense that you want to put your best foot forward with a professionally designed website. But is that the best use of your marketing dollars right NOW? Let’s chat about it.

Episode Highlights:

• Why People Choose Professional Website Designs
• The Drawbacks of Hiring Out
• Questions to Ask Yourself Before Hiring Out

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Stephanie 0:00

As a teacher business owner, you know how important it is to use strong visuals in your branding. It only makes sense that you want to put your best foot forward with a professionally designed website. But is that the best use of your marketing dollars right now? Let's chat about it.

Stephanie 0:18

Hey there, teacher, business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:29

Welcome back to the podcast. It is the last Saturday of the month, which means another installment of the Let's pay less series. If you're new to the podcast, on the last week of the month, we focus on popular things that people tend to spend money on in the marketing space. And the reason we do that is because there's a lot of FOMO that happens in marketing, and we feel like if we're not spending money on this, then we're going to get left behind. So my goal is to take away some of that FOMO. We dive into these popular budget busters, and we decide if it's something that we should be spending money on, or if maybe our marketing dollars are better spent somewhere else. If you've listened to this series before, you know that I don't give an opinion one way or the other. Instead, we look at the pros and cons so that you can think about it from a perspective of having a choice that you don't have to pay for something just because everybody else is doing it. So let's dive in.

Stephanie 1:32

Today we're talking about professional website designs. Before I started my work as a service provider, I think I've shared this before on the podcast, but I was a blogger for myself. I had my own website, and in my work as a blogger, I have seen a wide range of websites. I have seen some gorgeous, professionally designed websites, and I have seen bare bones websites, and everything in between.

Stephanie 2:00

I understand the desire to have a beautiful, professionally designed website to represent your brand, and let's chat about some of those benefits, like why people choose to invest money in a professional website design. So the first reason is that it just looks really professional. Because, as I mentioned before, as a TPT seller, a teacher blogger, you are in a very visual industry of online marketing. Teacher business owners - they just they want their websites to match their brand and look professional and hiring a professional to design your website can give you that look you're going for. Another reason why it's helpful to have a professional website design is that you're able to defer to an expert. You're able to put your vision in the hands of an expert. Because I think we've all been in situations where we have an idea of what we'd like, we have it in our head, but we have no idea how to get it there. For me, cake decorating is one of those things where I always have big plans for how I'd like to decorate a cake, but my skill set just does not match my vision. And so the same thing can happen with a website design. Hiring an expert can help you bring that vision to life, because there are a lot of complicated tasks when it comes to putting together a website. So either building a series of landing pages or adding a WooCommerce storefront - there are probably tasks in your vision that are best carried out by someone else. Another benefit to hiring a professional website designer is that it saves you time, because there are a lot of things that you can DIY when it comes to website design, but it often takes a lot of watching and re-watching YouTube tutorials, you might take a course or, you know, there's good old trial and error, but hiring a professional can save you a lot of time in the long run, and then you can focus your attention on other parts of your business by outsourcing this really time consuming task of building your website. And the final benefit I wanted to mention is that when you try to design your own website, you often have to turn to bulky plugins or page builders. It makes the job easier for anyone to do, but it also bloats the code of your website and can slow it down. And so when you hire a professional website designer who actually does know how to code, then you're able to have a more streamlined website that looks great, but it also has good site performance as well.

Stephanie 4:56

Stephanie 7:13

Hiring a website designer is a very personal choice, and a lot of factors go into it. I would never make a recommendation for someone one way or the other. Instead, I'll just give you a few questions that you should consider before hopping on the wait list of a website designer. Question number one should be, how often do I refer people to my homepage? Because while most website designers focus on the whole website, the homepage gets the bulk of the attention. I mean, it makes sense, because your homepage is the face of your website. But really, how many people are you actually sending to your homepage? I know that the vast majority of the traffic to my lifestyle blog goes directly to a blog post, because my website visitors get there by using a direct link on Pinterest or Google. I don't feel like my homepage needs to be very fancy, because very, very few people ever land on it, but your homepage might be a huge part of your marketing strategy. In that case, you might want to invest some money into making your homepage the best it can be. Question number two is, Am I missing out on income because of my website design? Now I mean this in a couple of ways. First, are you missing out on the benefits of increased sales from blogging because you don't have a website and you have no idea how to build one. If you know you'll be at a complete standstill without hiring help to build your website, then you might want to consider it so that you're not missing out on that potential income. If hiring a designer gets your website up and running, then it's probably worth the investment. But on the other hand, if you already have a pretty consistent blogging workflow, you're getting fresh content out there, it seems to be converting pretty well. Maybe a website design overhaul is not necessarily at the top of your priority list, because you probably aren't missing out on that much income because of your website design. But then the other way that you could be missing out on income is if the overall user experience is poor on your website because people are leaving before they follow the link to your TPT store. Bloated web designs, you know when you use those bulky plugins or website builders, that can really impact your site speed, and it can impact user experience, and that means your blog posts are going to be less likely to convert to sales. There are certain design choices like font size and color and that can also impact user experience on your website, and that can reduce the time people spend actually reading your posts. If you have a pretty good idea that you're missing out on sales because of your current website design or lack thereof, and you know you don't have the time or skill set to fix it yourself, that's when you might want to consider hiring someone to help you. Question number three, does my need for ongoing support match my budget? So if you opt to have a website built for you instead of doing it yourself, you'll need to consider the ongoing support that you're going to need. I mentioned it before, but things get glitchy. Plugins break page builders update. If you build it yourself, it's often easier to figure out what's wrong and fix it, but if someone builds it for you, it's likely that you're going to need to add some ongoing support into your budget moving forward. So when you're shopping around for a website designer, be sure to ask about the cost of ongoing support and how that's structured. Question number four, does it have to be all or nothing? So it might be that you can build the overall framework of your website, but you just need a hand with a few things here and there. I know that there are some really good all la carte service providers who are happy to help with smaller website projects as they pop up. So if you're pretty comfortable with the basics of building a website, this could be another option to leverage a professional in the areas where you could use some additional help. This could be a really cost effective way to access some of that expertise of a professional website designer without the price tag of a complete website overhaul. Then the final question I want you to ask yourself is, am I going to use my website? Because if you are newer to blogging and you've never set up your workflow before, I would hesitate to spend a bunch of money on a professionally designed website until you know for sure that you're going to use it, that you're going to blog regularly.

So the last food for thought that I want to give you is that, yes, a professionally designed website can be a great addition to your branding, but I would hate to see the lack of a fancy website stand in the way of you starting your blog because some of the most successful bloggers I know have some of the most bare bone websites I've ever seen. You can make money online without a professionally designed website. It just needs to be functional. In my recent episode about what's so special about WordPress, we talked about how, because WordPress is so popular, there are so many options for customizing your website, and one of those is a website theme. And you're able to find beautiful themes that you can install and use and customize without having to hire out an expensive website designer, and that is a very easy way to get started with your blog. Have something that you're proud of without the hefty price tag, and then over time, as you see whether or not blogging is going to be a big part of your business, you can set a goal for yourself that you will go ahead and get that website makeover when you hit a particular milestone, and then who knows, by the time you get to that milestone, you might discover that your DIY website is serving your needs just fine, and you decide to spend that money on something else.

My website that I use for this business is the perfect example of a DIY website serving my needs just fine. It gives potential clients the information they need about my services. The buttons all work. They take you from point A to point B, just fine. I continue to get leads and email subscribers. People are able to join my wait list, but it is a very, very basic website that I created with only the features offered within my basic website theme. I opted for Astra because it's known for being a pretty lightweight theme, but it also has a lot of options for customizing. But honestly, I haven't really even scratched the surface of what I can do with Astra, either, because really, my website meets my needs. When I have time, I make a few changes here and there, try to make it look a little prettier, but again, it's functional. I don't think that I am losing out on any business because of the way my website looks. Someday, just for myself, I would love to invest in a professional website design, but for now, this one is meeting my needs, and if you want, you can head over to stephanieroyer solutions.com if you want to take a look at the DIY website that is currently supporting my business, I have no shame in my DIY website game, so go ahead and take a look.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.