If you are like many small business owners and are thinking about how to cut costs while bringing in new clients, you may be considering a “build-it-yourself” website. You can save hundreds, even thousands of dollars by building the site yourself right? The truth is that you may end up hurting your online exposure more than helping it if you don’t hire a professional web designer. The following article will discuss reasons why the build-it-yourself route won’t work. Why build-it-yourself websites fail…

You don’t have the time
Often many business owners we work with have problems finding the time to prepare us simply the content for their website, not to mention designing the entire website themselves and then having to put all of their content into the site. Let us focus on what we do best and build an affordable custom web site, while you focus on what you do best and run your business.

Build-it-yourself websites can look generic
The customization options in a build-it-yourself website are very limiting. You have to select a cookie cutter template that is not unique to you or your business. You do not have the option to modify the color scheme of the template or the layout, so basically your website will look like all of the other Build-it-yourselfers who chose the same template.

There will be bugs
There are so many details that go into designing a website that even professionally designed websites can sometimes have bugs that must be fixed. Many Build-it-yourself web sites do not render correctly in all of the web browsers because the site was not tested to ensure it works in all browsers. Over 50% of visitors now come from a mobile device, so it is very important that your site is mobile friendly as well as this number will go up to 70% in the next few years.

Your website should look professional
Many people I talk to are proud of their homemade website – and rightfully so! It’s very hard and tedious to use any do-it-yourself website software, whether you are a professional or not. The problem is that the goal of a novice is to make a working website, not a beautiful, interactive, professional looking website. A website should impress your potential customers, and convince them to hire or purchase from you.

Build-it-yourself websites are slow to load
Let’s ignore the fact that a do-it-yourself website is probably on a slow server. The bigger concern here is that when novices post pictures, they often use the raw file straight from the camera. Then the website software resizes how it looks – but the file itself is still huge. So when someone tries to open the website it takes a long time to open that huge file.

You need room for growth
Most do-it-yourself websites have a limit on the number of pages or links you can have, and it’s usually very few. So what often happens is that each page becomes really long with way too much verbiage, which is not a good web design practice.

Google is crucial
A Build-it-yourself website isn’t as easy to find on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo as a professional one is. There are many reasons for this such as improper coding, lack of Alt tags and effective title and meta tags in the coding, errors in the HTML coding itself, etc. A website must be coded properly for it to be effective in online searches, you will get little to no search engine exposure from a Build-it-yourself website.

A web designer has experience
A professional web designer often has many years of experience on visitor to lead conversion rates as well ensuring that you get leads from your website visitors. Also, web design is constantly changing with new technologies to offer a better experience to your visitors, these technologies will not be built in to your Build-it-yourself website.

It isn’t really your website
With all of the Build-it-yourself web builder companies, you are only renting the site from them, if you cancel, you cannot take your site with you to another provider. Every website we create, the content is copy written to the website owner and they own the site allowing them to take it with them to whatever hosting company they use.

It is not optimized for Search Engines so you have limited exposure online
The website builders may allow you to build a site, but they certainly do not give you access to the coding in order to optimize the site for search engines to understand when to bring your site up in search results.

To learn more about us, our affordable web design solutions, contact us today.