You probably came here because you need a website for your business or project. Perhaps you’re considering designing your website yourself to save some money. That’s why we wrote this post: Hiring a Web Designer VS Building Your Own Website. While this seems attractive in the short term money-wise, you’re likely to end up with a website that is difficult to edit when needed, a website that looks like you made it yourself (and you’re probably not a designer), and a website that is not user friendly on both desktop and mobile devices.
Limited Support
You may be dealing with limited support when going through a website builder like Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder, Weebly, Squarespace, etc. Wondering why the landing page you made to collect leads (that took hours for you to build) is not working? Just jump on a call with your Website Builder, wait up to 2 hours on/off hold to still not be able to determine any issues. When the real issue is that the image you put on your landing page made it look like you were selling something completely different from what you were actually selling. Or the words on your page included many spelling or grammatical errors. People left your page because they couldn’t understand. A web designer will likely use WordPress and help fix what needs to be fixed and change what needs to be changed, knowing the exact factors that make a great landing page that converts.
What to Not Put on Your Website
Many business owners don’t know what they should put on their website as far as images and text. Most times, there is too much text and images that are not representing their business well. Right when you load your home page, there should be a photo of what your customer/clients success looks like. Their aspirational success in a picture. A picture of the building you work in doesn’t tell people what they get. It may make it seem like you sell buildings. If you sell buildings, put beautiful photos of buildings, but if you don’t, then don’t! A photo of the owner and/or employees? If you work for a business what helps businesses create a strong community internally within their business, then that’d be great. Or perhaps you sell work uniforms. You’d want images of employees smiling with their new work uniforms on demonstrating that they look great and make them feel comfortable at work. Otherwise, that doesn’t go on your website.
If you are a realtor, you should have an image or video of a couple that just bought their first home. They’re standing in front of their house smiling and possibly shaking your hand. This demonstrates to viewers that you sell the feeling of happiness so your clients feel like they made a great decision in buying their house. If you’re a Pet Sitter, you should have an image or video of dogs that are happy and playful. People want their dogs to be with someone who takes extra good care of them and makes their dogs happy while they’re not able to be at home. Get it? Website builders don’t tell you things like this unfortunately. A good web designer will help you represent your business in the best way.
Search Engine Optimization
Website builders sometimes offer SEO add-ons for an extra amount. SEO is best done manually. If you don’t know what this means, let us simplify: To optimize your website, you must know and use keywords that have a high amount of search volume (amount of people searching a keyword/phrase per month). Website builders don’t do this research, so they assume things about your site based off the text on your site. This isn’t usually very accurate. A good web designer will research the best words to use on your website and add them to the places that matter: Title tags, Image Alt tags, URL slugs, and Meta Descriptions. This is stuff you may not understand, but just know that a Website Builder won’t help you with formatting your website correctly so Google will see your website. If Google doesn’t see your website, you won’t show up in the search results when someone searches “charlotte nail salon“.
Win: Save Money; Lose: Lose Time
Aside from the previously mentioned points, let’s look at the high level pros and cons: saving money and losing time. A website builder may save you money. A web designer could cost you anywhere from $800-$10,000. Building a website using a website builder may only cost you $25/month. In the short term, this can be great. In the long term, you could end up spending over $10k+ on your website if you stay in business long enough (and let’s hope you do!). The biggest thing you give up using a website builder is time. It may take you a month or 2 to finish your website. And you still will probably not consider it completely ‘finished’. Once it’s half-built, you’ll ‘come back to it’ when you get a chance. Guess what? You likely won’t prioritize it and you’ll have a half-built website that you wasted a month of your time on. A good web designer should be able to crank out a new website for you within only 2-6 weeks.
Hiring a Web Designer VS Building Your Own Website
Thank you for reading our post today. In our opinion, you’re better off hiring a web designer than you are trying to build your own website with a website builder. If you want to talk to a web designer near you, tap the Schedule My Call button below now and fill out the form.
This blog post is inspired by this great blog post we found Website Builders VS. Web Design Consultants: https://www.wpelevation.com/2017/06/website-builder-website-consultants/
Zander Aycock
Digital Marketer & Web Designer for Restaurants
Zander Aycock is a local marketer that is truly passionate about helping other local businesses. He has spent most of his time working with eCommerce websites and marketing them using Facebook, Instagram and Google with both paid and organic strategies. After gaining several years of professional experience, he decided to pivot and help some of the local businesses he frequents and loves. Since then, restaurants & other small businesses have had successful launches, grown their revenue and customer base, improved their customer's experiences, and got people back to their shops a second and third time.
