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It’s news to no one that the Internet is overflowing with business websites. Regardless of what you do and the market you operate in, we’re willing to bet that there are lots of companies in your space that offer similar services/products as you do, and to the exact same audience.
It’s only natural since a large part of the global population now shops primarily online. Regardless if they’re looking for B2C or B2B solutions, people turn to the Internet for help.
According to the latest findings, over 2.5 billion people shop online today and 75% of them do it at least once a month. Because of this, the number of business websites keeps growing at a rapid pace. The WorldWideWebSize reported that there were over 6 billion active indexed web pages in 2020.
When you zoom out and think about these numbers, breaking through the noise and presenting your case to the desired customers in a way that makes them choose you instead of your competitors… Well, it’s pretty complex.
Apart from the product/service itself, people are now focused on things like the company’s:
Companies are attentive to removing roadblocks between the business and the customers. In addition, they use a data-driven approach to display the right information at the right time to their customers. Nowadays, C-level professionals find themselves in a situation where they have to think multiple steps ahead before they make any decisions about their business website.
If you don’t have much experience with building solutions that meet all these touchpoints, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or even completely lost in the process.
This is where web consulting services come to save the day.
In addition to web development and software development, we at Share IT also do a lot of IT consulting. Since we package these activities as three different services, but we also offer some form of consulting as an integral part of our web development and software development - it’s easy to get confused about what makes each offering unique.
A couple of customers were particularly interested in learning how our standalone consulting services differ from the ones that are incorporated in our web and software development plans.
Since this article is primarily focused on web development activities, allow us to explain what makes our web development and web development consulting services different from one another.
In their purest form, these are two entirely different services that handle different aspects of the website development process.
Here are the main differentiators:
Our website development package is mainly focused on executing someone’s vision and providing a custom web-based solution that meets our customer’s needs. The consultations that we offer as part of our website development package are more focused on providing recommendations that help with the execution of an existing idea. To make it even more simple, when you hire us to do web development for you, we take the responsibility of writing the necessary code that will bring your web-based project to life and all the consulting that goes here is primarily focused on the best practices for executing the project from start to finish.
The consultations that are part of our web consulting services go beyond this and follow various aspects of the web development process: from mockup work, business strategy, creating the website’s design, building a development strategy, to developing a content strategy, engagement, building navigational paths, user experience journeys, prototyping, user interface design, offering SEO consultation, etc.
As you can see from the short descriptions above, these services are focused on completely different things and they usually have two different types of buyers.
There are two main values web development consultants can brings to you:
1. Proof of concept
A lot of businesses start planning their web projects based on hypotheses that are not fully tested. They see something they like from a competing business and believe that they can replicate their competitor’s success simply by “copy-pasting the formula”.
Speaking from our experience, this is usually a recipe for disaster. There are so many questions that you need to ask and answer before you go all in on something that you like. Just because a specific solution is working for someone else, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you as well. Here are some of the reasons why:
The list goes on. So, well rounded web development consultants are the ones who help you foolproof your ideas and test them out. More importantly, they assist you with building cost effective prototypes that will prove if something is worth investing additional budget or not.
2. Experience + strategic thinking
Building a professional website is quite challenging, especially for bigger companies that have lots of departments with different expectations and visions for the website. Naturally, this tends to create a lot of bottlenecks for the businesses because it’s impossible to make everyone happy.
Web development consultants are there to help you cut through the noise, take your big ideas and organize, prioritize and synthesize them into a clear, well thought out plan, with concrete steps. Web development consultants’ main area of focus is to build a strategy for an organization that will help it meet high-level business goals.
Depending on your budget and growth plans, you may want to invest in an SEO strategy from the very beginning. That way you’ll ensure that the technical part of SEO is taken care of and you can slowly build visibility in search with content marketing and off-page SEO.
Bottom line is, you shouldn’t have to go through the process alone - especially not because you’re creating a website that needs to represent your business on a global level (and that’s huge).
Thank you for reading this article in its entirety. We hope you feel more confident about the best way to handle your website launch or optimize your existing website for better online visibility, clear messaging, and more customers down the road.
At Share IT, we offer a one-stop solution to website development. We have experienced developers who know a variety of technologies and programming languages like the back of their hands, exquisite designers capable of tackling UI and UX equally, and business and content strategists who know how to make your website stand out from the crowd and bring tangible results.
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, contact us today to discuss your project. We’re always happy to hear from you and explore if we might be a good fit.
