The Downsides of Leasing a Website Design

At Ad House Advertising, we’ve come across clients asking us for help after their website design failed to meet their expectations. Often, these websites have been developed by national phone book companies or website template vendors that target small businesses and offer responsive web design, copywriting and SEO at a small monthly fee. They may charge per page, and usually, the website domain is not registered to the client. While a monthly fee of $149 may sound attractive, in two years, you’ll have paid nearly $3,000 for a very modest website!

These companies are often large out-of-state operations and are not as intimately familiar with your business. As you can expect, you do not receive the level of customer service and support you would from a local company that cares about your business’s success. They are often difficult to get a hold of, and you may not be able to add seasonal offers or update the content.

The websites that they design for businesses are often very basic with no distinguishing visual elements to differentiate you from your competitors. Not only that but if you copy and paste the content they write for you into your web browser, you will find that they utilize the exact same content for hundreds of their other clients. That gives you no SEO benefit.

The largest problem, though, is that you are not granted ownership of your website; you are essentially leasing it, hence the low monthly rate. If you decide to make changes to your website or transfer your website to a new vendor, you will find that you do not actually own any of the HTML, text content, design, or images. You will have to start over from scratch if you decide you are not happy with the web service.

Ad House Advertising believes that owning your own domain name, and having full ownership of your website is important. To find out if your domain is registered to you, go to whois.icann.org and type in your website domain name. You or your business should be the registrant’s contact. If you find that you are not the owner of your website, or if you are unhappy with the content or look of your current website, contact Ad House Advertising. We specialize in creating robust, beautiful websites that are effective in driving traffic to your business and designed for digital advertising.

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