Why would you go to a dentist? Because of her ability, knowledge, skills, advice and ability to take away your pain. Would you pull your own teeth? So why would you build your own website?
With so many tools and Do-It-Yourself options, one might think that creating a website and marketing it would be cheap and simple. Everything you need to know can be found on the web: just Google it. This is true if you just want a website. However, if you want a website that works and gets you more business, it’s far more complicated.
If everything was that simple, why would there be any professionals at all? Just Google therapeutic massage methods and do them at home or watch a video on tooth extraction and just pull it out yourself! However, marketing doesn’t work like that, just like any other profession.
What you need to consider
There are a ton of things you need to take into account when building and maintaining a website for your private practice. Here is a short list of problems that come forward when you try to do this on your own:
- No clear strategy – Creating a website without a defined strategy is like fishing without a lure. You just sit there waiting for visitors to come, but have no idea if you will succeed.
- No Proven Framework – You need to have a solid, proven framework for your marketing activities. You can’t just create everything based on intuition or perception: it will be mostly useless that way.
- You don’t have the right tools – Even with all the free tools available, you still get very few decent features and flexibility. You won’t be able to make something outstanding with those.
- There is no one to guide you – You will be on your own and have a ton of questions. Without someone to show the way, you will spend hours trying to find solutions for each emerging issue and it may take forever to find the correct mix.
- Security – proper websites need to have security sings on them to ease the anxiety of the visitors. This is especially important if you are healthcare practice. You can’t verify the security yourself.
- Performance– You need to make sure your websites performs perfectly 24/7. It has to meet certain criteria like fast loading speed, availability on multiple devices (mobile, pc, tablet), no crashes, etc.
- Maintenance – updates and bug fixes will take too much of your time and even if you do it, there is a high chance you will miss small things. These add up and create a mess eventually.
- Tailor it to your industry – You need a lot of experience and ability to be able to tailor your content and design to your specific niche. Something very general might seem great to the untrained eye, but if you want real results, you need professionals.
- Design – Even if you have a talent for it, you can still end up having a badly designed website on your own. There are special tools and conventions which are used for web design and you can’t learn them overnight. It will take way too much time to come up with anything decent.
- Implementing new ideas – Each time you want to carry out a new idea, you will have to go through research, trial and error. Figuring out the correct way to do it, making it useful for your audience, taking care of design all take too much time. Even keeping up to date with what is new and possible is hard.
These are just a few issues that you will meet. There are many more. As a result, you will end up wasting many days and still get a bad website that won’t help your business.
Focus on what you do best
Your website should be the hub for all online marketing and social media interactions. It takes too much time and effort to plan, carry out, support and update everything by yourself. Focus on what you do best and leave your private practice marketing and support to professionals – it’s cheaper than ever these days.