On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, it’s a very simple podcast about websites.
I’ve been building websites since the 1990s, and we’re now in 2025. That’s a lot of years. I’ve seen a lot of different changes in web design, a lot of techniques, and plenty of fads come and go.
It’s got to the point where I can look at a website and tell you pretty much what year it was made, based on the design trends. It’s like carbon dating for websites.
Over the years, websites have become easier and easier to make. Back when I first started, you had to be a code monkey. You needed to edit the code, write HTML, CSS, JavaScript, whatever it took. I was originally coding contact forms in Perl or CGI. That doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t do that now.
Today, you can build a website with no technical knowledge whatsoever. That makes it far more accessible, which is great in some ways, but it also means anybody thinks they’re a web designer.
I’m not complaining because we’re losing business. We’re not. We get the clients we want, the ones who want to grow and succeed, and we help them. That’s what we do. What I’m talking about here are the people missing out, the ones who don’t understand.
There are people I’ve spoken to over the years—one person in particular comes to mind—who decided they didn’t need a professional website. They said they got business through other means, not online. Great. Fantastic. I’m happy for you. You get business through magazines, networking, flyers, phone calls, whatever. You don’t need a website.
But then this person decided at some point they would need a website, but nothing special. Just something to exist. They didn’t want to pay a digital marketing company, didn’t want to use a professional web designer. And there are a lot of really good web designers around, locally and in networking groups I know. They didn’t want one of them either. They just wanted someone to put something up so they could say, “Look, there’s my website.”
And that’s exactly what happened. The site went live, and it was clear it was built by someone who had never made a website before. It looked like my first attempt. It looked like a four-year-old had thrown it together with sticky-back plastic, Sellotape, and poster paints. Things were broken. It didn’t work on mobile. Huge gaps everywhere. Text overlapping because the person didn’t understand CSS.
It looked amateur. It looked pathetic. Anybody looking at it could see that. But they didn’t care, because their business came from elsewhere.
Here’s the problem…
You might not need your website to generate business, but what happens when people who hear about you elsewhere want to check you out? They’ll look at your website to see if you are who you say you are, whether you’re the solution to their problem. They’ll look online and see this amateur, broken website, and they won’t use you. They won’t enquire. They won’t contact you.
Your website is putting off potential customers, and you don’t even know it. You have no idea the business you’re losing because your website is silently telling people, “Look how amateur I am. Look how little I care. This is my attitude to everything in business.”
Remember the old adage: the way you do one thing is the way people assume you do everything. If your website is cheap, broken, full of errors, and looks amateur, people will assume that’s how you run your business too.
By cutting corners on your website, you are losing clients. You might think you don’t need it to generate business, but you absolutely need it not to turn business away. And that’s exactly what it will do.
So, to anyone thinking, “I don’t need a professional website, I can just put up something cheap for a presence,” think again. How much business is that costing you? Because it will be costing you business. Potential customers won’t contact you. You’ll never know they were even interested.
That’s the risk. That’s the danger of thinking you don’t need a proper website.
So that’s my message for this week’s podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Leave me a comment or a review if you did. If you didn’t, don’t. And I’ll catch you on the next podcast.
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
