The Importance of Having a Website as a Creative

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Having a website is one of the most important assets you should have.

Answer these questions for me:

When someone asks to see your work, do you instruct them to follow you on Instagram to see your creations?
Do customers send you their order information through Facebook Messenger or Instagram DMs?
Are you panicking when Instagram or Facebook often crash randomly and you have no way to message your customers or clients about orders?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you need a website TODAY!

This is where you post on a regular basis and communicate what’s going on with your creations, your creation processes, and pretty much anything you want the world to know about your creative services or endeavors.

Right now, we are in what I would call a popcorn society. Everyone wants everything so fast and quickly like when you prepare popcorn in a microwave that most are often overlooking the things that should have additional time placed into them. We want those quick results with a lack of or a minimum amount of work so much that most of the time we end up putting in twice as much work than what was initially required if we would’ve just taken our time to start with.

Social media has been a big driving factor of this popcorn like mindset especially when it comes to running a service or business as a creative. When I say a creative I’m mainly referring to any entrepreneurs who have created an honest living with a natural born talent or method of gaining income. In an effort to gain that income, social media can be a great thing and resource to use, but if you depend on it and use it the wrong way you’ll end up losing out in the long run.

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I feel like every creative should have their own website for a variety of different reasons.
Lets check out the benefits below:

Benefits of Having a Website

More Creative Freedom
More Technical Support
Larger Audience
More Organization
Increased Credibility

More Creative Freedom

With your own website you have ultimate creative freedom to present yourself to the world how you see fit. From the colors, to the style of text. Everything designed on your own website is based on your decision for the website design. You don’t have to go by a specific template or style, everything is created upon your decision. With Instagram, you can only make posts, you can’t change the colors of your page to match your brand, just certain graphics. That’s a limitation to your creativity and first impression to the public. With a website, you would be able to change any color of any element of your site with no problems if you have a designer or you’re the designer and have the knowledge and background for website development.

More Technical Support

There’s a lot more direct technical support for you as a business owner with a website than with social media. When something crashes on social media, we often have no idea what happened or what’s going on due to a lack of technical support on social media sites end for each user. There have been plenty of times when I wouldn’t be able to comment on posts, or my likes wouldn’t go through on Facebook or Instagram and I had no idea why. There was no one I could email or call to see what the issue was. I just had to live with the fact that the feature I was trying to use for my business at the time through social media was not working and either sit and wait for it to just start again, or I had to go another route or option. You always have a less chance of your website crashing or just not uploading one day out the blue like we have often seen with social media platforms which lessens the chance of missing orders and promotion schedules daily.

Larger Audience

With your own website, you actually have a much larger audience presence opportunity on the internet than you think. If you play your cards correctly when it comes to SEO, or your Search Engine Optimization, using your website analytics you have a higher chance of being seen on major search engines like Google and Bing compared to only being limited to the audience present on specific social media platforms. Algorithms are a little more complicated on social media which makes it even more tougher to get in front of your target audience daily and consistently. With a website, the algorithm is there but a little more fairly calculated.

More Organization

You can organize your files, images, and creations a whole lot more with your own website compared to social media. Really on some social media platforms you may not even have any organization at all which can become a problem and shed a negative light on you and your business or service for a first time customer or buyer.

Increased Credibility

With your own website, you qualify for a whole lot more than if you’re using social media platforms as your website. Your credibility increases as it makes your business more professional and like we said before organized. More people are more prone to shop with you because it shows that you have put the effort and time into your creative endeavors. You’re taken more serious with your own website overall. I’m at a point as a consumer, personally, if you don’t have a set website then I won’t purchase from you as whole. This aligns with more security. You increase your trust between customers and clients that they can come back to your website whenever and purchase from you with ease and through payment processing systems they are familiar with.

Stop making social media your main platform for doing business and use your social media traffic to build your own website for your own platform as a creative.