Their Heart is in the Right Place

There is no doubt that when a family member, friend or a friend of a friend offers to create your business website that their heart is in the right place.  They love to dabble in website design and want to help you out.

There is a good chance that going this route will save you money and you get to work with someone that you already know and trust…..what could go wrong?

Truth be told it could be a great solution where you get exactly what you want – a professionally designed website, meeting current design standards, delivered on time and on budget and you had a great time working with your family member or friend.

In my experience the above case scenario is incredibly rare.

Find below some things that I have heard first hand from clients who tried a family member/friend solution first.

• The friend doesn’t listen to what the business owner wants and only does things their way.
• The business owner doesn’t like what was designed but doesn’t want to hurt their friend’s feelings by criticizing it.
• The family member says that they don’t know how to program a specific functionality that the business owner really wants on the website.
• Building and maintaining websites is the friend’s hobby so the business owner’s project takes a backseat to the friend’s career and family.
• Down the road the business owner hires a professional website designer to enhance their current design only to find out that their website was not built based on best practices and isn’t collecting valuable user statistics. These statistics would have helped the web designer and business owner understand how to improve the website.

Sadly, more often than not, after feeling ignored, frustrated and dissatisfied with the final result delivered by the family member or friend the business owner ended up working with a professional website design firm to get the job done.

The way you represent your business online is critical.  Leaving your online reputation to a friend who likes to create websites in their free time could cost you business as well as your friendship.