There are many reasons why the choice of a professional agency is far better and safer than using a freelance worker or a home office. For the purpose of not having to repeat myself or bore you to tears, I will call all the freelance workers home offices as well.
- A professional agency has insurance for liability. A home office seldom has insurance. Make sure you ask if the company you select has E&O insurance. This will protect you if any errors or omissions are made on your project.
- A professional agency has redundancy in services. If your designer is out sick, goes on vacation, quits or moves, we have several professionally trained designers, programmers, SEO experts and/or email professionals. If a home office worker goes on vacation and your site goes down, you are out of luck and possibly out of business. If your home office closes 3 months into your project your money will be gone. Ask the company you select about the various people working on your project and if this is their full-time job?
- When using a professional agency to design your web site, we take into account all the Search Engine Optimization elements required to help achieve good rankings. This will normally save you 50% on your search engine set up work. Most home office providers will claim this, but very rarely is a designer a trained search engine expert. After running a professional agency for many years we never ever had the designers do search engine work or the search engine professionals do design work. Our search engine experts assist our designers and provide them the correct elements required. A great deal of our business is done by charging needed set up fees on home office designed sites when it is time to get ranked in Google. Ask the agency or home office you select for recent projects and the current Google rankings.
- A professional agency has scalable in house services. If you need email or programming we can bill by the hour and do it quickly. It does not have to be outsourced. After your new site is designed you may have the need for a rapid email in a few days. We have the professionals in house that can design and send it on our own systems. Ask the company you select how they might help you in the future with your marketing efforts. Will they be able to do your email marketing, pay per click management, and Search Engine Optimization? If the answer is yes, check with their current clients that they provide these services for.
- A professional agency does not outsource your work. This normally turns into an endless nightmare of customer service issues. Each time you want something done on your web site you have to go through a series of chasing the home office to chase his outsource to get the work done when typically their outsource provider is also a part-timer or in another country. Ask to meet all the people involved in your project if possible at their office. If a face to face meeting is not possible then at least a conference call where you can learn how each team member will contribute to your project and how the project is managed.
- A professional agency has professional offices, with employees, conference rooms for meetings with your design and marketing team. This may not sound important, because we have many clients all over the country, but it streamlines and expedites workflow. How confident do you feel meeting in the converted garage of a home office and putting the future of your business in the hands of what most likely is a part-time effort? Ask your prospect company if they work from a professional office. The cost of a small office is as little as $500 a month. If a company does not have an office then they clearly are not a professional. How many people and backup systems could possibly be available to someone working from their house? Your job will clearly be outsourced to other part-timers.
- A professional agency has long-standing relationships with many small, medium and large companies. Most home offices can’t keep clients very long because of the lack of ability to provide adequate service. When a portfolio is published, find out how many of the listings are current clients and how long they have been clients.
- A professional agency uses the combined resources of several talents that are constantly being educated and improved. A home office worker seldom has time to advance their skills because they often have full-time jobs or no employees to help them with service. Does the company you are considering have a portfolio of diversified services for clients that have grown with them?
In a nutshell, I think you can say that the best reason to use our professional web site development and marketing agency is that we are the best at what we do. At Active Web Group we have over a 95% client retention rate. We are world leaders in Search Engine Optimization and development and have several of the most respected brands in the world as clients.
For more information on why you should be using a Professional Website Agency, call us at 1-800-978-3417 or Contact Active Web Group and let us help you!
