Your Website is Not a ‘Build it and Forget it’ Proposition

Here’s Why Using a Professional Web Designer Saves You Time & Money

I once worked with a guy who would come in on Monday after a rough weekend and, no matter how bad he felt, sit down at his desk and cheerfully proclaim “it’s always better to look good than to feel good.”

He was joking, sort of.

Too many of us take this attitude with our website. We want a great-looking site that drives desired behavior from users. We work hard doing it ourselves or hire someone to make it beautiful (or at least something we’re okay with) and then we…

Forget about it. We move on to one of the thousands of other priorities being thrown at us each day.

But remember when your mom told you “looks are only skin deep,” and that “real beauty comes from inside”?

Moms are annoying that way because they’re right.

Of course, you want your website to be well-designed and look great. But you can’t stop there. Your website needs to be beautiful on the inside too.

Here’s why.

Michael had built a site that wasn’t going to win any design awards but which worked decently promoting his business and managing his appointments as an outside contractor.

Then he got an email from Google. His site showed evidence that it had been hacked and until the problem was fixed Google would not display his company in their search results.

Sure enough, his site had been compromised by malware. And the disappearance from Google results seriously impacted his business.

The web is the Wild West of malware. Because of this, it’s vital to keep your site updated with the latest security patches and bug fixes. One of the most common ways hackers get in is by exploiting outdated web software. And if Google suspects your site might be infecting visitors with malware, it’s buh-bye to your listing until you get it fixed.

Not a nice place to be.

At Smack Happy, we take a two-tiered approach to building and hosting websites.

We’ve designed hundreds of sites that have delighted our clients with beautiful work that meets and exceeds business expectations. You can see some examples in our website design portfolio.

But that’s only the starting point; we can handle the ongoing maintenance as well. We keep our WordPress Support plans simple, so you only pay for the services you want. 

We offer ongoing website maintenance because the web isn’t like a car. It’s more like a laptop. With a car, you can do a complete refresh every few years (or every ten or fifteen years if you’re like some of us).  A laptop you’ll replace more frequently. But while in use, its OS and apps are updated constantly, to keep them fresh, working well, and, most important, secure from external threats.

If you use WordPress for your website (and we do), WordPress is updated frequently and you’ll be notified almost daily about updates to extensions.

Smack Happy will take care of these updates for you. We’ll keep your website fast and running smoothly. We’ll keep it optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and we’ll make it easy for you to keep your content fresh and up-to-date because if your site doesn’t have new and current content (like blog posts or company news) it won’t deliver an on-the-mark first impression to your visitors. It also won’t boost your ‘organic’ (free) placement in search results, something we’ll cover soon in another blog post.

Remember, your website isn’t a car. It’s a laptop. You need to keep it up to date because not keeping it up to date is too big a risk for your business.

And Michael and his de-listed, malware-infested site?

“I tried to resolve the issue with my very limited tech know-how…FAIL! So I went on Google and YouTube to get how-to videos to do it myself…FAIL! Then I spoke to Smack Happy, desperate to get my website back to normal, and they fixed it in a day!

“I was confused on how and when to backup my site and when I had to update my plugins. Smack Happy took over and now takes care of all that for me. Smack Happy is great! They deal with the stuff I don’t want to deal with and they do it fast.

“THANK YOU! (A million times over)”

Is it better to look good than to feel good? We don’t think so. Not when we make it easy for your website to look good and feel good.