Building a website is easy, right? You just need to put some text on a page, maybe add an image or two, and then throw a few colours in to make it pop.

If only it were that simple… or maybe not, then I’d be out of a job. But choosing who to build your website isn’t simple either. We recently published a blog article which contains information to help you find the right people to build your website, but in this article I’m going to explain why it’s important to find the right company.

1. Understanding the details

If you want a website for your local youth football team, you don’t need someone who is an expert, or understands the football industry. The website would contain some pictures of kids kicking a ball around, maybe trophies if you had won any, some text explaining when and where the team meets up and plays, and maybe a form so parents could get their children signed up. Nothing that requires any real in-depth knowledge, and no one is going to complain if you say “We will train kids to be professional football players”.

But you’re not a youth football team, you’re a financial planning/advice firm. If the company building your website decided to spice up the language on the website and said “We will ensure your investments are constantly growing”, it’s you who will have compliance (or worse) breathing down your neck.

I remember back when I first started working at The Yardstick Agency; I had no experience with anything to do with the finance sector. FCA? Never heard of them. And it showed when the first few sites I had produced were being reviewed internally and the things which were brought up included:

• Using the firm version of the Chartered Financial Planner(s) logo when only the individual planner was Chartered
• Putting legally required text such as “investments may go down as well as up” in smaller text or hidden away.

Luckily, we have people internally who knew these things were wrong. Not all companies out there would know how important these things are for you.

2. Knowing the profession

It’s not just about knowing what you can and can’t say, but also about knowing the profession as a whole. The last thing you want is a company that will recommend against adding a VouchedFor widget to your website, for example, or one who doesn’t even know what VouchedFor is.

A nice-looking website is great, but having one that’s catered to the financial services profession is even better.

You want the company that’s building your website to make recommendations on things you could do to make your business stand out more. You want a company that will recommend you add client reviews, social media presence, or a list of qualifications and certifications you and your staff have obtained, and more importantly which ones to feature and why. You don’t want a company that focuses on showing your fees first and foremost, trying to make you seem like the cheap and cheerful option.

Building a website doesn’t require specific profession knowledge, but making a great website does. For example, the time of year that’s busiest for us developers at The Yardstick Agency is March, due to VouchedFor’s Top Rated guide being released. That means, in the lead-up to March, we do our best to clear our schedules so that if a client’s name is mentioned in VouchedFor’s guide, we can get that information onto their website as soon as possible.

Having this information added to your website as soon as possible allows potential clients visiting your website to see that your company has been recognised by an independent body, and helps instil confidence.

So, if the company that builds and maintains your website isn’t aware of this, when March rolls around, they may not have the capacity to get this seemingly small, but important, symbol of trust added to your website ASAP.

3. Understanding your audience

When making a website, the designer and developer behind it need to be people who know just how far to push the boundaries of the website.

The company building your website needs to understand the technical literacy that your clients have. But they should know the sorts of things users of your website are likely to engage with.

It’s all well and good paying them extra to build you a section on the website that will allow clients to speak with an AI chatbot about the services you offer. But this inhuman interaction not only makes potential clients feel less connected to you, but it may also never get used as anyone who wants to find out more about your services is more likely to pick up the phone or drop you an email.

I’ll give you an unfortunate example of where we didn’t fully understand the audience, and the website suffered as a result. We had a client who wanted to include a social aspect to their new service website which offered access to learning information.

They wanted to be able to post content, and users who were signed up could comment on it and share their feedback, but also that their users would be able to have discussions with one another about it through the website.

At the time, we thought that this was a great idea. It sounded like it would boost engagement with users on the website, and would lead to the client getting some important feedback, too.

However, just a few months after launching the website, the social side of the website was dead. The users enjoyed the content, and often said to our client how much value it added to their business, but no one posted anything on the website. All of the social functionality just added bloat to the website which caused it to be slower than it should have been.

4. Using the right tools for the job

Websites can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. They can be as simple as a few pages with text on them. Or, they can be complex monstrosities that even the developers who originally built the site are scared to touch. And of course, they can fall anywhere between those two extremes.

Your company’s website isn’t Amazon, and you don’t need to worry about translating for every major language or storing vast amounts of data. So, if a company is offering to build you a website which includes these things, do you need it?

Every unnecessary feature a Content Management System (CMS) includes by default will add bloat to your website, which will inevitably slow it down. For example, no-code CMSs such as SquareSpace don’t have your design in mind, so they can’t minimise the code used to build sections of the website in as few steps as needed, as they have to account for every possible thing you could include. This can often lead to a repetition of styles, which increases the size of the files the browser reads when loading a web page, causing slower loading times.

This goes back to the example I gave earlier. If we hadn’t included the social interaction system on that client’s website, we would have reduced loading times by about one second. That may not sound like a lot, but if you’re accessing the 20-30 pieces of content each month, the time starts to add up quickly when navigating around the website.

5. There when you need them

Whether it’s before or after the website is launched, you want someone who will be around to answer questions, make changes, and most importantly help guide you. You’re not a web developer, you don’t know what can and cannot be done, you don’t know how long things will take, and you don’t know how to fix things when they break.

Finding a company that isn’t looking to get your money, quickly produce a website, and then part ways is vital. You want a team that will not only take time to understand your needs, but will help you in any way they can when it comes to your website.

We can be that team for you

Our designers and developers will be here when you need us. If you’d like to find out how we can use our expertise and knowledge of the profession to help you build a website that connects you with your audience, please email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call us on 0115 8965 300.