Showdown between a Website Design Company and a Di...
You’re taking a step back to look at your business, and realise that efforts in digital marketing haven’t kept up with its substantial growth. Let’s accept the fact that people will no longer be satisfied with the static display of information online. Their expectations have increased and they want to have refined design, significantly greater interactivity and an optimized user experience.
Here comes the all important question, whether you should decide on a web design company or digital agency for this task. On this page, we’ll look into the differences between both, as well as the circumstances in which you ought to decide on one or the other.
Just before we begin on that, let’s look at a situation that you as the business owner could possibly be in – having an incapable current provider taking care of your web site. Maybe this particular vendor isn’t up-to-date with the most recent trends, or their response time for bugs and updates is getting way too long. As with any other service sector, such a issue may just be the direct result of staff not being sufficiently motivated, or perhaps having basically no interest in the aim of supporting brands and businesses. A scenario along these lines will surely be worrying since it could possibly harm your business.
Undoubtedly, it’s about time you stopped these folks from screwing around with your company. Now, find a pencil and paper, have a seat and clearly jot down the objectives of your website (from a digital marketing and advertising standpoint) prior to Googling for vendors. That will likely save you a lot of time on speaking to, meeting and reviewing prospective vendors. Following that comes the interesting part, you may choose to type “web design agency” or “digital agency” in the search engine and both will give you substantially different results.
It’s going to be a difficult task choosing which to go with. Let’s have an in-depth analysis of what exactly each one does.
To begin with, a lot of web design companies depend on you to give direction. They’ll simply translate your requirements as-is into the final product, and contribute no strategic marketing advise in any respect over the process. Speaking of competencies, they are normally less complete in their offerings. Say for example, a company can create beautiful designs but craft less than satisfactory code. Look somewhere else, and you come across yet another that perfectly hand-code lines of HTML and Javascript without being capable of doing the simplest design. In any event, there exists every chance that they may outsource the portion that they are less proficient at. Who knows, they may ask you to find another vendor in order to fill the gaps in areas they may be unskilled in? This sort of unbelievably disorganized situation needs to be prevented at any expense.
Of course, these web design companies have their plus points too. As a result of a smaller amount of expertise, they generally tend to be cheaper too. If you’re knowledgeable about the web design and development process, would like to exercise more control over the vendor and do not require any kind of digital marketing assistance whatsoever, a web design company can be the best option to take.
Conversely, digital agencies spend effort and time to understand both your requirements and goals. They generally tend to ask open-ended questions, setting up the platform for rigorous discussion. They share the most recent technological trends, and suggest how new tools may be implemented to solve problems far more effectively. For instance, the particular digital agency will be more interested in utilising design to raise conversions in an eCommerce web site as opposed to achieving lovely visuals alone. Via these kinds of in-depth discussions during the course of the project, your general digital strategy and objectives will definitely be well refined by the conclusion of it.
And so are digital agencies the actual answer to everything? All that has been mentioned so far on them may seem too fantastic to be real. However, everything comes with a catch and it is not any different for digital agencies; their varied offerings along with deep specialisation in each means that they charge a hefty price tag. With all kinds of specialized personnel within their team, they have a tendency to be more appropriate for initiatives with bigger budgets. In certain situations, they may propose a certain approach or workflow that may seem to be inflexible for your purpose – this is because the proposal is founded on their expertise and past experience, which they tend to believe is right for you.
In all, both give you the same thing, however the manner they go about achieving it is immensely different. Such is the irony in the world of web vendors. If you take into account the different elements of a project, such as project management, budgeting as well as the overall business circumstance, it becomes easier to make a choice between either a web design company or digital agency. A word of caution, however: do consider all aspects carefully and decide sensibly lest you suffer from buyer’s remorse.
Author: Johnson
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