When you’re building a premium spirit or alcohol brand, there is a lot of time and money spent getting the branding, packaging, photography and everything else right.
You want the product to look the part and you want people to see the quality in what you’re selling. But more times than not that same level of detail or expertise does not go into the website and it can make your brand look cheaper than it is or should and its usually quite obvious from the get go why this has happened.
“I need a logo, branding, packaging, website to make my business complete.”
The Page Builder Tell
To start with, at first glance it’s easy to look at these websites online and see that they were built with page builders or templates. There’s a certain knack to viewing these things that can show how much effort went into it and where it became an afterthought. Where you’re thinking may be, “I need a logo, branding, packaging and I suppose we also need a website,” as opposed to, “I need a logo, branding, packaging, website to make my business complete.”
Why Agencies Cost So Much
At the same time, you also want to ensure that you hire professionals or experts in their field. Obviously, by going with agencies they ensure that they have professionals in each field, but they also charge extreme overheads which is not a feasible option for most whiskey or alcohol startups.
I know this from both sides. I used to work for an agency where a client could be charged €2,000 for a website and the person actually building it is lucky to see a quarter of that amount. The agency has its overheads, staff, offices, sales, account management and everything else that comes with running an agency. That doesn’t necessarily mean the work is bad, but it does mean that the cost can quickly become unrealistic for a small business or startup.
Going Freelance (And Getting It Half Right)
So instead,sometimes business owners decide to go it alone and DIY a website themself not really understanding what goes into making a website. Or they make the decision to go with freelancers or smaller solo businesses, which in many regards is the right choice, because a lot of these agencies outsource to them anyway and this way the business owner cuts out the middle man and reduces their cost. The one problem with this is that they try to stick with one person instead of assembling the right team to work together.
A Brand Designer Isn’t a Web Developer
An excellent brand and logo designer may be able to create branding and packaging to an award winning standard for your business and mention that they also do web design. But websites are so much more than web design and the ultimate goal is not to have a pretty art portfolio of your brand. But rather to have something that can convert visitors to customers and get your brand, story and marketing message across to your customers visually.
It’s one thing if your website contains beautiful photography of your products and excellent typography from your brand, but if the message and SEO isn’t right, your website is not doing its job. The amount of times I come across websites in the whiskey industry where they have amazing above the fold sections with stunning imagery and fantastic typography, only to then realise it’s not spliced together but is a single image, which does absolutely nothing for SEO.
A professional web designer/developer who knows not just how to make a website look pretty but how to build and optimise one would have known that you use the background image, get the typography from the designer and rebuild it using actual fonts and words that search engines can read and that can be used for SEO.
Expert brand builders who also dabble in web design, don’t think this all the way through and most of the time if they have thought of it they will struggle to build it as they need to take into consideration, screen sizes and breakpoints. An expert developer can have it built out in an hour because they have the know how of how to do it.
I’m not saying that businesses shouldn’t hire brand designers for the design work of their website, as they are the ones most often who develop the brand and aesthetic. In fact, in most situations I think they should, or at least insist that they should, work in tandem with a proper web designer/developer to ensure you get the best overall website possible.
Knowing Your Limits
I find that a lot of brand designers who dabble in full websites tend to build them with basic tools like Squarespace or Wix, which have a litany of restraints (I’ve written about that here). They use these tools because they require little to no code at all and thus make it easier for them to use. What makes these tools easy to use also makes them limited in their ability, and thus visitors will see the disconnect between your high-end brand and basic website.
And again, this isn’t me saying that every website built with Squarespace or Wix is bad, or that using a template automatically means you’ve done something wrong. The issue is when the tool becomes the thing that dictates what the website can be rather than the business deciding what the website needs to be.
“You wouldn’t hire a plumber to do the job of an electrician and vice versa.”
Stay in Your Lane
This is so often the case because the roles and such become muddied in an online world, where I, as a web designer/developer, get asked so many times, “Can you do us a logo?” and the answer is always no because I’m not a logo designer.
I mean, sure, I could put something together in Inkscape or Illustrator, but it will never be to the standard of a professional logo designer because I’ve never studied in that field or gained years of experience. I’ve also been asked the same thing about social media marketing and again, I can connect your website to social media and set that up for you, but I’m not a marketer.
I design and develop websites and I do it very well. And I think there’s nothing wrong with saying that.
Outside of an online world, you wouldn’t hire a plumber to do the job of an electrician and vice versa, despite the fact that they work in tandem with each other on most building sites and have a good understanding of what the other does and what their job entails. You hire both for their expertise and hope they work well together. With websites it should be the same way.
You don’t necessarily need an agency with ten different departments and a massive bill. You can have a brand designer, a web designer/developer, and a marketer where you need them, and have those people work together.
“The website is often the first place someone actually experiences the brand for themselves.”
Build the Right Team
The problem isn’t that someone used a template, hired a freelancer or didn’t spend €50,000 on an agency. It’s when someone says, “Yes, I do all of these things,” and the business owner doesn’t question it and goes, “Yes, okay, that’s fine.”
That’s when things start to go wrong. Because you can end up with high-quality branding, design and packaging, but unfortunately you don’t have a website to match.
And for a premium brand, the website is often the first place someone actually experiences the brand for themselves. It shouldn’t be the bit that was added at the end because everyone thought, “I suppose we need a website.”