Reasons to Hire a Professional Web Designer

You can build a website yourself. Builders make it possible in an afternoon. The better question is whether you should: whether the site you'd build will bring in work, and whether those hours are better spent on your business.

I design websites for a living, so take that into account. Here is what you get when you hire someone, what your options are, and what it costs with me.

What a professional does that a template doesn't

A template gives you a layout. The work that makes a site useful happens around it:

• Deciding what goes where. Which pages you need, what each one is for, and what a visitor should do next. Much of a site's job is helping someone find a phone number, a price or a booking link quickly.
• The words. Headlines that say what you do and who it's for, and a clear next step on every page. If writing isn't your thing, this is where a do-it-yourself site most often falls flat.
• Phones first. Every page checked at phone size, not just on a desktop screen.
• Photos that work. Images chosen, cropped and compressed so pages stay fast, with alt text so they make sense to screen readers and search engines.
• The technical basics. Page titles and descriptions for search results, analytics, forms that actually reach your inbox, SSL, and your domain connected properly.
• After launch. Backups, uptime monitoring, and security and dependency updates, so the site keeps working.

The Altar of Beauty left this review on Google:

Jamin did a wonderful job creating a new website for me, with fresh and professional look. I loved his writing input in different areas of the site, editing skills and different photo placements. Overall he created exactly what I need to move forward with my services and offerings while adding the beauty touch and my own style and suggestions to it.

— The Altar Of Beauty, 5 stars on Google

Your options

Build it yourself on a builder. The cheapest in cash, and the right call for a hobby site or for testing an idea. You pay in hours instead, and you work inside a template. I worked through the numbers in The Real Cost of a "Free" Website Builder.

Hire a freelancer. Prices and quality vary widely, so judge by past work. Ask who will host the site, what you'll pay after launch, and whether the site is yours if you part ways.

Hire an agency. A team suits a big project with many moving parts. You pay for that team, and the person you meet may not be the one building your site, so ask who will.

Choose a fixed-price plan from a small studio. That's how I work: one build fee, a set number of pages, a set process, and a monthly care plan, so you know the full price before you start. Popproxx is one person, so you deal with the person doing the work.

How to judge a designer's past work

Whoever you consider, look at sites they've built, not screenshots of them:

• Open them on your phone. Do the pages load quickly? Can you read them without zooming?
• Try to do what a customer would. Find the phone number, the prices or the booking link. Count how long it takes.
• Read the words. Can you tell within a few seconds what the business does and who it's for?
• Look for variety. If every site looks the same, yours will too.
• Check that they're live and current. A portfolio of sites that have since been replaced or taken down says less than one that's still running.
• Ask what happened after launch. Who hosts the site now, and who fixes it when something breaks?

You can do all of this with the sites on my portfolio.

What a Popproxx plan includes

Every plan includes:

• a design made for your business, with two rounds of revisions before it's built;
• a site built to load fast and work on phones;
• on-page SEO, Google Analytics, and a contact form that emails you;
• room for tools you already use, like a booking calendar, videos or a map;
• stock photos I find for you, if you don't have your own;
• 30 days of free fixes after launch, for anything that's broken.

Pay in full for 10% off, or half now and half before launch. From launch day, the care plan is $79 a month: hosting on Vercel with SSL, daily backups, uptime monitoring, and security and dependency updates, month to month. Changes after launch are $150 an hour.

If you change your mind before you approve your design, and within 30 days of your intake, you get the build fee back in full. The pricing page has the exact terms.

How it works

You sign a plain-English agreement, pay, and fill in a short intake about your business, the pages you want and the look you like. I put the first design on a private preview within one to two weeks. You approve it or ask for changes, then I build the rest and launch it on your domain. After launch, questions go by phone or through the contact form, and I reply within one business day. The steps are on Our Process.

When you don't need to hire anyone

A builder is fine for:

• a single page while you get started,
• a hobby or a side project, or
• testing whether an idea has customers.

Hire someone when the site has to bring in work. See the plans and what each includes, or look at the sites I've built first.