It’s an analogy we use at The Creative Collective a lot: “A website build is a lot like a house build”. Why is that? Well you have to find a place to put the house (the domain or web address), you have to work out what kind of house you are going to build and how you will design it, perhaps with the help of a specialist architect (who is akin to a UX designer) that would produce sitemaps and wireframes, and then you have to decide who you will build with (us we hope!) 

Once you’ve chosen your ‘builder’, you then need to make multiple decisions on the type of house you want. Will it be an off-the-plan (theme based site) or a custom build? You’ll need to give consideration to how many rooms you want and how big (how many pages), and what fixtures and fittings you want (features and functionality). And just like a house, with a website you can build it on a budget, or go for gold with top of the range everything.

Nice front shame about the inside…

Even once built, some websites, just like houses, look okay from the outside. Perhaps they have a ‘nice fence’ and a ‘shiny door way’, or in web terms, not a bad design or a reasonable home page.

But just like a house, if you come to know it well or were a qualified building inspector, you will start to come to notice all the creaky floor boards, the broken door knobs, and the ceiling cracks and crevices. In web terms, this could look like out of date themes and conflicted plugins which have not been updated in a very long time (or ever), pages which throw security errors, pages with a slow load time, a substandard experience on a mobile for most users, and even worse, not being at all findable on a search engine. 

Who’s doing the upkeep?

Now we all know that if you live somewhere you really need to constantly upkeep your house, by either doing so yourself (if you have the skills and time), or, by getting in the tradies who know how to do the stuff you don’t know how to do, or don’t have the time to do. When it comes to a website, the same principles apply. The fact is, you should be giving one of your most important marketing assets a spruce up on a periodic basis (we’d suggest a look at it every six months and a proper reno every 2-3 years), and to know exactly what tradies to turn to when you need a hand. Someone like us, someone you can trust to get your house, or in this case a website in order.

Have you outgrown what you have?

A common scenario we see in the web world is that in the early stages of a business, is that someone (quite possibly in-house) will throw a website together, just to establish a web presence. 

And whilst a site like this may serve its purpose at the time, if your business has since grown, you’re now likely busy, time poor, and quite possibly have a website that if it were a home, you’d be a little embarrassed to show your friends through. An analogy might be that it still looks like your teenage bedroom with some daggy band posters which seemed fantastic at the time, but which now no longer represent who you are as a person, nor as a business and what you have to offer the world.

Whilst we are here to guide you through the many decisions to be made as part of any new website build, the first decision you need to make is whether you are ready to get some help from the professionals. 

We can help you with a new website, or just a few updates which you can access via one of our Support Packages, or if you’re unsure what needs to be done and want us to take a professional look, we can do this through one of our website audits. 

We look forward to helping you improve your digital realty soon! Enquire here.