There are guys out there that sell canned “web solutions” for specific industries: dentists, veterinarians, chiropractors… These services are awful for you.
Why? Well, think of it this way: it would be rather silly of me to select a dentist that – oh let’s say – specializes in Puerto Rican patients. Sure, they could provide a cultural rapport that I might find comforting, I suppose. But I’d still be better off with a dentist that was an expert on what my needs were (obviously).
To prove the point, here are some of the ways I think it hurts your business:
- Your website doesn’t look like you.
- Your website doesn’t sound like you.
- Your website annoys your visitors.
Choose your website design from a template? Then it’s not going to look or feel like your business. Worse yet, if your competition has chosen the same template, you could be confused for somebody else. If you don’t demonstrate loyalty to who you are as a business, then you can’t expect your audience to either.
A lot of these guys offer boilerplate content about your industry. Look, no one is coming to your website for random articles about your industry. If someone wants to research a topic, they’ll be heading over to google (not you). It doesn’t speak to your proficiency or establish you as an authority. Users aren’t fooled by generic content. It just gets in their way.
These services also provide countless ways to irritate your audience: playing audio, presenting shiny visual elements that look “click-able” but aren’t, making things fly about on the screen, burying important information… Just imagine: how would you feel if your local supermarket had empty boxes laying around, played music way too loud, and stored the milk behind the deli counter?
Bottom line is these things don’t work for you, and they don’t work for your audience. Sure it’s cheap. But if you’re paying for something that doesn’t work, then it’s costing you more than you think.