With so many free website builder websites out there, the question i am usually asked is whether it is important to hire a professional website designer. My answer for this question is Yes but with caution. Most people who ask this question are usually those operating in a tight budget.
The reason why i answer with a caution is that so many website developers claim that their designs are so relevant that they charge thousands of dollars for a single website. This is not fair as website development is not a complex process as they claim.
However, for a beginner it is important to hire a cost efficient professional web designer who will execute your strategies to a higher level. I discourage free websites for the following two reasons.
You don't actually own the website
In many cases, a free website does not belong to you. It belongs to the owner of the domain. Take for example if you have free website called (call.brandmac.net), the website belongs to the owner of the domain (brandmac) while for you, what you have is a sub-domain. Suppose you are using the website for e-commerce and the owner of the domain closes the website, then your website will also go down. For this reason, you should pay for a domain and create your own website. The good thing is that this is not expensive at all. For only $25 you can host your website for a whole year.
There is more to a website than the design
The second reason why I don't recommend a free website is that there is actually more to a website than meets the eye. I like to give the example of a car. A car could have a very good body but have a very bad performance. The reason is that the engine could be poor but the body be very pleasing to the eye. This is the same way that websites work. You can have a very fine looking website but with a very poorly done engine. To solve this paradox, it is important to have a website that is optimized for search engine. Professional designer will be very relevant in this since he knows the benefits of having a good optimized website. He also understands the rules of the game. Remember the internet is full of websites. It has over 200 million domains registered and still counting. For this you need to be way ahead of the competition when it comes to page rankings.
It is not expensive to find a good website designer. Our company Brandmac has many years of experience and charges very little for website design and search engine optimization