A YELL/HIBU Website for your business?
No way! And this is why!
These services count on your nativity. You may be an expert in your field of expertise but not an expert when it comes to an online presence. These companies depend on you being too busy to think about how you may look to people on the Internet. These services actually count on you believing them. More often than not their customers do not get anywhere near what they were promised with little or no ROI (return on your investment).
Poor Experiences with Hibu/YELL/WIX type Websites
We have spoken to many Yellow pages type customers. Its amazing how many do not realise there are other options! They even mostly know there website looks very poor quality but either do not have the time or the will to seek a better alternative. Worse still, they then believe that anyone who offers websites must be some kind of pirate on the high seas just after their money. ALL industries do have these ‘cowboys’ or Pirates. As all industries have good honest, hard working people. Most independent web agency deliver good to high quality work both in design and delivery. They are mostly very ‘passionate’ about their work and detest these corporate companies that exploit small businesses with shoddy cheap templates at ridiculous prices.
Yellow Pages are alway trying to play catch up
Once upon a time we all used Yellow Pages to find a plumber or drain man or tree surgeon.
Of course the big yellow book has been long obsolete.
YELL.com then arrived. A huge company who then had to figure out how to keep going through paradise shift in people’s behaviour. Companies like this do not have (or do not wish to have) the time and passionate care it takes to build a decent website. Their business model depend ONLY on numbers of sign ups. Pay their workers as little as they can and then mass produce. They are about as far away from delivering professional websites as can be as they can only train amateurs to put templates together. A bit like a child doing a school project. Yet charge you as a business as if it were high end work with first class delivery. Which of course you know it is not.
Hibu or YELL For Website Design Issues
They can afford to send some spotty faced slick salesman to your door with what seems like a no brainer. Every business needs a website and our fantastic BIG company can deliver you one for next to nothing. Then the trouble starts. You will be hit with hidden fees and underperformance, not to mention a lack of customer service after the sale. And a website that looks like a school project done by a 12 year old.
You Don’t Own Your Own Site
As you are using one of their templates you DO NOT own your business website! You are renting the use of it for as long as you remain under contract with them and pay for it. Unlike a professional web design, after the site has gone live you can can’t easily move a website from these services to a new hosting company, nor can you develop your site outside their remits.
IThis is also true of other template driven website builders that use build your own type software such as WIX, Weebly and SquareSpace.
Some of these services also copyright the content you have written to themselves!Therefore if you tried to use that exact content on a new website they can sue you for breach of ‘their’ copyright.
Expensive Monthly Fees (Website Rental)
We hear of people paying as little as £20 per month (any fee is too much for this btw) to £500 per month. From our expert eye there is no difference between the two. Their sales people will be working on commission so by the very nature of that system will try to get as much out of someone as possible. The £20 a month had a bad day….the £500 quid a mother got a round of applause at the expense of who they literally just ripped off.
A typical customer review on HIBU is:
They built my website and I was told it was to be £80 per month. Three months later I was being charged £300 per month. When I complained I was told that it was only an introductory rate for three months and as it says in the terms it goes up after three months, and I am now bound in a 12 month agreement.
Hosting and Website Design are like Rugby and Football (They both wear shorts but are completely different things)
Monthly Hosting costs of anything above at the very most. £20 a month is literally theft. It costs very little to host a website for a customer. And apart from a tiny part in maintenance and a certain amount of responsibility is very low in both these point.
Charges of £80 to £500 a month are these companies making money on fresh air at your expense.
Building the house
A website Design is the “House” . Web Hosting is the “plot of land” You would generally pay for a bespoke website to built and designed. This would normally be a one off fee. You could develop such a website over time and may have to get a new design 5 years later simply to keep up with the ever evolving internet. But it should be affordable and last you at least 5 years.
The Plot of Land
Hosting is kind of where the now designed and built website has to live. You simply rent this off the web company who is delivering this service. It gives you web space and the ability to set up emails on the domain name. Depending on number of emails the price can vary. BUT for an average small business owner £200 a year would easily cover this, especially if you used something like a gmail email instead of domain name email.
In short if you have a HIBU/YELL site or any other of these TV advertising template services you can only expect a very low quality (sometime appealing) website for your business. It will (or already has) cost you. You’ve paid for a cheap template that is often not even mobile friendly and often not secure.
- Not Secure (often with SSL (the padlock security icon), so makes it impossible to access on some browsers
- Awful looking Templates (Make your business look underwhelming, and possibly even ‘cheap and nasty’ looking.
- You often do NOT own your website
- You DO NOT own your trading name domain name
- You will struggle to add updates (poor or non existent customer support)
- They will make it VERY difficult to cancel (But of course cancel you CAN!)
- NOT mobile friendly
- NOT secure
Can we explain any of this any clearer?
Please get in touch if you want us to help you and save you from the total waste of time and money one of these site is (or will be ) to your business.