Pros and Cons of Having a Freelancer Create Your Contract Service Business Website
As you have looked into creating or updating your contract service business website, you may have considered hiring a marketing agency, a freelance website creator, or a full time content manager to help you with your website.
However, the key is choosing the correct person for the job if you aren’t going to tackle your website on your own.
Each of these options may or may not be the right choice for your business, depending on the person or agency’s level of experience or website methodology.
In this article, we will specifically touch on the pros and cons of freelancers and why they may or may not be the best person to create or update your website.
5 Pros of Hiring a Freelancer To Create Your Contract Service Business Website
1. Freelancers Are Generally More Cost Effective
In general, freelancers will generally charge a few hundred, to a few thousand dollars to create your contract service business website. On the other hand, a digital agency may charge $1,000+ and a content manager could cost a yearly salary.
If you have a small budget for marketing, a freelancer may be the best initial option to get you off the ground. However, you should also be cautious that you aren’t saving money at the expense of quality.
Some freelancers will offer discounted rates in comparison to other options (agencies and full-time content managers) because they may have fewer resources, less experience, and may take longer to complete your website.
The best way to determine if they aren’t cheap at the expense of quality is to ask them the right questions to gauge if they have the skills you need (website design, content writing, etc.).
If someone is willing to create your website for cheap, but they hand you something that is custom coded and difficult to edit, it is not worth the money.
You will want to optimize for a freelancer that can create a website on a non-code platform that works best for your business goals. That way, when they are done creating the website for you, you can edit it without having to know complex website coding.
2. Freelancers May Have Specialized Skills You Need
Some freelancers may specialize in a niche that is needed for your website project. For instance, they may know how to connect a scheduling tool like Service Titan to your website.
Or perhaps you have an existing site and want to move to an entirely new website builder. A freelancer may be specialized in migrating websites and ensuring that all of the links are successfully redirected to your new site.
Whatever the case may be, some freelancers can offer more specialized skills than some digital agencies or content managers. However, depending on the freelancer, you may come across more qualified digital agencies or content managers.
3. Freelancers May Have More Flexibility
Freelancers can offer more flexibility since your project may be the main project they are working on at the given time. They may be able to adapt to changes more quickly or provide you with revisions sooner.
In comparison, some digital agencies may have less flexibility since they are usually managing large client bases with multiple projects going on at a time.
On the other hand, an internal content writer can generally offer more flexibility than both because creating and managing your website would be your sole job.
4. Freelancers Can Offer Your Website Personalized Attention
Working directly with a freelancer could allow you to get more personalized attention on your project because it is their sole focus. This could enable them to customize and tailor your site to your exact preferences.
Going back to the comparison of digital agencies - digital agencies may not be able to customize or tailor your site as much since they are working on multiple projects simultaneously.
However, if you had an internal content manager, they would be able to provide even more attention to your site than a freelancer or a digital agency since they wouldn’t have to split their time.
5. You Are Able To Directly Communicate With a Freelancer
Unlike a marketing agency, where you may have a project manager and multiple people in between you and the people actually working on your website, you have a more direct line of communication with a freelancer.
This could enable you to have more in-depth conversations on your vision for your site and allows you to prevent misunderstandings that could come from one person managing your project and a different person executing it.
4 Cons of Having a Freelance Website Creator Make Your Contract Service Business Website
1. Freelancers May Have Limited Resources or Skills
If you were to get your website created by a digital marketing agency, they usually have a team with a dedicated website strategist, web designer, content writer, and other specialists.
If you have a freelancer create your website, they are doing each of these jobs as one person. Depending on the freelancer’s strengths, the content or the design of your site may be lower quality because most people aren’t equally strong at all website creation activities.
This is not to say that one person can’t do it all, but it is to say that perhaps that person should be a person on your team, an intern, a dedicated internal content manager, etc. Rather than someone you pay a few hundred or thousand dollars to touch your website once.
Another thing to be cautious of is freelancers that are only comfortable with certain website platforms. At Blue Trade Media, we recently spoke to a business owner who had their website created for them by a freelancer website creator.
In this particular instance, it was clear that the freelancer website creator was most comfortable with WordPress. Now, WordPress is not a terrible website platform - however, it is not a very user-friendly website platform for someone who doesn't have website design experience.
The way the freelancer set up the site made it very difficult for the business owner to make edits to their own site and each time they did try to edit their site, they had to load time-consuming manual updates that ate hours of their time.
The way the site was set up made them reliant on the freelancer for making minor changes to their site - a position no business owner should have to be in with their website.
A well-built website should enable you to make edits to it yourself, rather than having to rely solely on the person who created your site to make edits.
2. Freelancers Generally Do Not Have a Backup
Unlike a digital marketing agency, freelancers are generally a team of one. So, if the freelancer happens to be busy with another project, or perhaps their day job, your project could be delayed due to them not having enough time.
Also, if your freelancer happens to get sick, or get in an accident, your website project could be indefinitely delayed because they generally do not have a backup.
3. Freelancers May Not Offer Support and Maintenance
When you get a website created by a digital agency, they may offer support and maintenance for the website they have created for you (at a monthly cost of course). These updates may include design tweaks/ updates, new pages, new content, and more.
Freelancers that specialize in just website creation will generally not be interested in touching a website after they created it because they are onto their next website build.
Or in other cases, you may encounter a freelancer that will offer “support or maintenance” services because they don’t have a ton of clients. However, just like the example we referenced earlier, you will want to be cautious that they aren't just charging you to make changes to a site they made difficult to use.
4. Working With a Freelancer Makes You Dependent on an Individual
While you can have a freelancer provide you with examples of their work and have them explain their processes, there is still not 100% certainty that they will create exactly what you want.
For instance, they could begin your project and start creating a site that doesn't look like what you envisioned. While you can provide feedback during check ins, there is a chance that what you request they change is out of their scope of expertise.
Additionally, most freelancers are doing website creation for the first time on their own, which creates the risk that they may encounter issues while creating your site, or they may decide to stop doing freelance work.
Hire The Person To Create and Manage Your Contract Service Business Website
Ultimately, who you decide to create your website is up to you and will depend on your website needs and your budget.
Fortunately, you have many options to pick from, like creating a website on your own using a template on a no-code website building platform or having an intern, internal content manager, freelancer, or digital marketing agency create your site.
To learn more about how you can create a successful contract service business website that drives leads to your business, subscribe to our newsletter below.
