Why I’m Not a Fan of DIY websites
A lot of ads are showing up lately about hosting companies allowing you to build your own websites by using their website builders. It may be fine for some. Overall, the amount of time spent trying to figure it out and have it look professional will cause you to lose money in the long run. And the frustration factor can bet pretty high too! Hiring a professional who will create a more professional website than the DIY site builders.
Not to mention names, but a particular “Daddy” in the industry struggles to allow for consistency between pages when using their site builder. If you have an eye for detail, you will see that placement of items will be slightly different on every page. Differences could be logo placement and sizing, header text placement, content margins, page lengths, footer link placement, and more. These tiny differences kill the website’s professionalism which also kills your business’s professionalism.
Most build-your-own sites end up with a lot of extra coding too. This has been known to slow upload time. It also makes Google unhappy which lowers your ranking (how easily the site can be searched). If you change the text format several times, you could possibly have multiple sets of instructions for that text. All these extra instructions make the code dirty and search engines LOVE clean code. They like tidy, precise code. If you aren’t worried about search engine optimization, then this isn’t an issue for you.
Another reason to hire a professional is that we will help you control your need to use every single bell and whistle the DIY platform offers. For a few clients that started with DIY sites, I toned down the number of colors they used and worked on text consistency. That alone made a big difference. A few clients chose to leave the DIY and went for a full blown custom site! The sites are day and night! So much better for all the reasons listed above. Now they send me updates and the code stays clean. A transferred to a better content management platform where they can still make changes themselves with consistency in the layout.
So… getting off my soapbox. If you want a great quality site that works well and doesn’t want to make you pull your hair out, contact a professional web designer! If you want it to load quickly and be optimized well, then contact a professional like myself. Save your time and energy by giving your website the professional attention it deserves. Contact me by calling 804.402.0084 or emailing me at [email protected]. I want you to focus on building your business and bringing in the big bucks, not a website!
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