But let’s face it – your website will be the first thing your potential clients will see so having a less than professionally designed website will end up costing you money in the long run.
DYI tools may offer you some advantages, but have you thought about the dangers of building your own website, too? Consider the following aspects and decide if a DIY website is a good idea for your business or not.
The danger of website builders
Not all website builders are the same. Some of these web design tools are offered for free by hosting companies, which sell you the domain and also attract you with free website building software. This kind of applications allows you to build a DIY website within hours, but the results are not reliable.
A professional website includes two parts: the front end and the back end. Website builders allow you to create only a front end, without offering support for crucial back end elements such as search engine optimization, keyword tags, meta tags, mobile device scaling and multi-browser compatibility. Besides obtaining a website without a solid structure, you also risk having your website modified without your approval or being attacked by malware.
While some free website design sites may offer you a professional looking website and a user friendly backend – they are usually on a ‘MultiSite” environment which is not a good idea for SEO if you want your site to rank well in search engines.
What about your website content?
You may be wondering what is the connection between your do it yourself website’s structure and content. What could prevent you from updating your website with fresh, interesting content?
The answer is that just posting content to your website is not enough. You also need to make sure that the website allows you to organise your content efficiently and not in a way that discourages visitors from reading your posts. Moreover, no matter how relevant and engaging your content is, the website needs to be optimised for search engines if you want it to be found. You will lose many potential customers if your organic search ranking is very poor. Content leads us to the next crucial aspect of web design: SEO.
SEO compatibility
One of the biggest the danger of building your own website is that while it is true that having a powerful content strategy helps your SEO, today websites need to be optimised for humans rather than for search engines, but this is not enough. There are several crucial SEO elements that you may miss when you design your do it yourself website, such as title tags, optimised URLs, alt image tags, links to other pages and so on. Having a professional expert in SEO that also does web design is a must for many business thinking of getting online.
Call to Action
The reason behind building a website for your business is usually generating leads that qualify to profitable customers. Your website needs to offer your visitors the possibility of easily becoming leads. This is where calls to action enter the game. A DIY website may not permit creating effective call-to-action buttons or it may not ensure for your visitors the opportunity of subscribing to your newsletter or downloading content for free. A website which does not interact with its visitors but looks like a static, outdated brochure is not of any service to your business.
Security
One of the most overlooked issues of the DIY website these days is security. All of the open source platforms like WordPress and Joomla etc are sadly lacking security. Most people don’t realise that their site may be attempted to be hacked up to 6 time a day with many of them successfully hacked over a period of time. These are all things that a reputable web designer should mitigate for you.
A DIY website will eventually cost you profits
Many small businesses chose to build their own website in order to save money, but eventually they end up losing more than they have gained. There are multiple ways an inefficient website can make you lose money: ranking poor in search engine results, not generating leads, wasting time on troubleshoot, needing to spend more money on pay-per-click advertising and risking losing all the data on the website if hosting is unreliable. Furthermore, a DIY website may have serious security flaws. It can be attacked by hackers and you may become liable if customer data is stolen. Are you willing to take all these risks?
Your website is the most important element for ensuring a powerful online presence of your business. DIY websites are a bad idea because they usually look unprofessional and they are similar to hundreds of other websites. They are not tailored to your business’ needs and they are not designed with user experience in mind, either. By using a professional web designer and you will definitely enjoy long-term benefits.
Case Study
One of our clients had a website for 5 years and would only get about few leads from it in all that time. After consultation with us we redesign his website, made it more appealing and user friendly, optimised it for search engines to the point where he was then getting 4-6 leads per month from his website providing a 10 x ROI (Return on Investment) after 6 months so basically his site paid for itself in a few short weeks. (see his testimonial here)
