Someone asked us recently what marketing skill turned out to be way more important than expected. A lot of people default to saying traffic matters most, or maybe copywriting, positioning, branding, understanding audience intent, all that stuff. And sure those matter. But for me personally the answer was actual web design and development skills, because that’s kind of become my forte over the years and I didn’t expect it to matter as much as it does.
Here’s the thing – there are so many drag and drop website builders out there now. Wix, Squarespace, all the “no code” builder platforms every YouTuber has told you to use at some point. And to be fair, those are genuinely good products. They let you spin up a decent looking site fast, no coding required. But if you’re trying to actually run your business on one of those platforms long term, you’re competing against literally everyone else using the exact same engine under the hood. There’s no way to get a real edge, your basically playing with the same deck as every other business on that platform.
Having the actual ability to build your own site, rather than relying on a template builder, gives you access to things that genuinely move the needle from an SEO perspective. Custom code, plugins, scripts, backend stuff you just cant touch on a locked-down builder. It opens up a completely different tier of options. I use WordPress mostly, there’s other solid platforms too, or you could go straight PHP if you really want full control. Either way it frees you up in a way that stock editors just don’t.
Think about it like a car analogy – would you rather drive a stock car straight off the dealer lot that literally everyone else also has access to, or would you rather have something custom built and souped up? If you’re trying to actually win, you want the 10 second car, not the stock one. That’s basically the difference between a custom built site and a template one.
I’ve watched so many people grind for months, sometimes years, trying to force their homemade drag-and-drop site to perform, and it just never really takes off. If you have the ability (or hire someone who does) to build on a more flexible platform, that alone can completely change your trajectory.
Which brings up an interesting tangent – why do so many big websites, even from massive companies, still look and feel terrible? Genuinely, you know who has the worst websites on the entire internet? The government. Any government or state run website is straight up atrocious. We’re talking sites that are a minimum of 15 years out of date, half the links straight up broken, entire pieces of public infrastructure running on ancient code that nobody wants to touch or update.
I was recently trying to track down a list of grant recipients that was supposed to be posted on our county’s website, just trying to see the results of something our city applied for, and navigating that site made me want to throw my laptop across the room. It’s honestly a pretty accurate allegory for government in general – painfully outdated, resistant to change, desperately in need of a refresh. And if you ever dig into what these agencies actually paid to build these sites originally, you’ll find stuff from like 2007 that cost a quarter million dollars to build and has looked exactly the same, broken links and all, ever since. Absolutely wild when you think about it.
So yeah, if I could go back and tell myself one thing early on in marketing, it’d be this – learn how websites actually work under the hood. It pays off more than people expect.
