Running a webdesign agency in 2021, would it still be worth it? 6 Reasons why it pays off the clients their ROI.
I know what you are thinking. There are free website builders, so why pay for a webdesign agency? Well, here is why. After 268 projects, it’s time for blog post.
6 Reasons why working with an agency pays off the clients their ROI (Return On Investement).
1. Unique ideas:
More heads is more ideas, this leads to great suggestions. A great example was one of our first clients (Second one FYI). We took a beer on a late day together with some independent painters. A dutch niche name idea became a brand logo. The suggestion that brought a light at the dark tunnel with just a good daily phrase.
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For example they wanted to find a good name for their painting company, we simply said in Dutch (De Schilders) or ‘The Painters’ on a .be domain. We did not believe it was still available.
These days they rank #1 in Belgium search results if you search for a ‘schilder’ painter on the Belgian Google.be.
2. The ROI (return on investement).
A great website will cost more then a free website, true! Wordpress is free and easy for beginners. One important notice: Will it be as good in performance then a PHP/HTML website? Not really, here a great example.
One of our clients had really good content but did not see traffic/sale results. Imagine with them, you put months of work in your Wordpress, almost have no leads at all. They contacted us, we had a great talk and took this ‘crazy deal’. Muroflex pays us only if we get him from 300 to 30000 visitors in the first year!
After a huge in depth analysis by us we found out they used Wordpress, a nice looking website like it should, while the Elementor plugin + 40 plugins did make the responsive (phone) version very slow! 7.4 seconds loading time is like browsing the internet in 1990 over a phone connection. We increased google speed insights score from 21% to around 83%.
That alone is a 4 times increase, which means the website is 4 times faster showing results in Google as well. In the first month there was a 355% increase in traffic. Two monts later we have a middle line of 3.5k% increase. The snowball is just forming on the top, so the invoice is in the make.
We removed and cleaned up a lot unneeded css / script files that come with all those huge plugins. Also a lot image reworks, keyword and code fixes did improved this website.
Do you get our point here? It was free and simple to make while it costs more in the long term, they payed another webdesign agency to make this website 8 years ago while the web agency clearly did not know what they where making. Our client pays over 600$ a year to use these crappy plugins on a ‘free cms platform’ in the end.
One moment we almost would remove Wordpress to completely block out all the wrong html outputs and issues. A simple selfmade php mini CMS could do just the same while that would put us in a 98% speed rate by Google.
Google PageSpeed is a family of tools by Google Inc, designed to help a website’s performance optimizations. Those insights scores are calculated on the global speed performance based on all websites that exists on earth.
We dare to say we score 98% on the ones we have build from scratch.
3. Logo and better visual story translation.
We can show you 5 clients that had a huge success on start while we had a blanc paper to start with. Imagine: you can design whatever you want, the client has an idea but does not know what it should be like, visually and something that will sell ...
Our branding experience and visual story ‘feeling’ can lift and show ideas the client was not even thinking about. Usually we present 5 logo’s to start with.
Don’t get us wrong but good design is the key to success. Coca-Cola did knew this in 1892 as well. While all independents work their ass off, most of them might get that extra mile futher with a strong visual identity. Some still don’t get that.
On the other hand we also did make sub-logo designs for companies. One of them wanted to sell special road based software and was starting up a side-company within a special but original niche. Trafiroad.be asked us to design a cool ‘RIS logo’ while the logo should have a satellite. Due to the fact that they have a yellow brand, build roads and are one of the biggest working under the government their wings. We presented just one logo that was approved in 5 minutes. A road alike logo in a fluid written ‘ris’.
4. Networking.
We help them, they help us. Simple and effective, but not always a true story.
From a designer perspective you need credits for your work, especially if you make a deal to work on a low price setting. We have seen it a few times to deliver too much unpaid hours to a client that gave his words to do something in return. Sadly we don’t do this anymore.
Simple reason: We have had overlapping projects while for the same hours on 4 projects one of them payed the other 3 (lost hours). Also clients don’t like it if you cannot reach a deadline, it happened 3 times in those 268 projects we have done meanwhile.
Some tasks can show up while you want to offer your clients the best possible service. There where times we where honest that one of the tasks was not our strongest skill (also it would safe us hours searching a fix). We asked one of our local company friends in the area instead if he wanted to do a payed job for us. Another client was happy.
5. Expertise and Trust.
Work with domain experts, not recruiters or platforms. The talkers that sell it over someone else don’t know what they talk about. We can show and have the results of 17 years analysis.
Read it twice.
Newer is not always better. Period.
Experts understand the details and nuances of your initiative and idea. We as design agency work 24–48 hours if needed around the clock, just to serve and avoid loss of money for our clients. Give us one platform that will be around if your website is down, your webstore is hacked on Wordpress… Freelancers can generally start working immediately and take you at the heart.
6. Better SEO and UI results.
It continues on the top of this story but a good agency with over 17 years experience in making websites can write code down in a way it’s very compact and ‘well thought through’. A few lines of code that replace 50 times that and does exactly the same as what your website should behave like.
In terms of functions and safety it can add up fast with a lot backend code.
Also we do spend a lot time on the right settings for all images used online, optimize formats, avoid not needed code, give a better caching (pre-delivery of a website to a visitor) which speeds up the website loading a lot for any possible client. A great visitor experience is key to success.
Last note
It could get a few more points as well here to show of some webstores we have rebuilded and how we did succeeded in a great ROI for those e-commerce shops but we don’t want to have a portfolio here.
I’m looking forward to the comments, feel free to share the story if you support it. What is your vision and if you are running a web agency like we do, tell us about it. We love to read your story as well, It’s a very great and creative way of earning income while it is a great motivation.
We are always happy to see a smile on our clients their faces 5 years later on. One of our clients is around 16 years today so I want to thank Valerie in public for their trust in us.
Kind Regards, Frederick Alonso
website: SEO & Webdesign
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