Can a business owner or the friend or family member of a business owner put a website together? The answer is yes. But there are many problems with this line of thinking. We will review and discuss each of the main problems with this method of design below:
Time & Effort
Ok so now that you have decided to setup your website you need to find out how to do it. Well first its best to run to the bookstore and buy some books on website design to learn about good techniques and get some tips. Each book will tell you something different so you will have to take the overall balance of the information and use that as a guideline. Now its time to do research on what software to purchase to design your site. Once you have your software installed its time to run back to the bookstore and buy some books on how to actually use the programs you just bought. After about 10,000 pages read and months of research you are finally ready to start designing your site.
So you spend the next few weeks putting together a website. After designing, deleting, modifying and starting over several times you finally get a site that you are satisfied with. Its been months since you first started out, it costs thousands of dollars in books and software but you are finally ready to put it online. meanwhile if you had hired a website design firm such as Advertising Solutions, Inc. you could have spent a few hundred, had the site done in a few weeks and spent the entire time focused on your business.
Tools
The software to create an attractive, professional and quality website is expensive. Professional website designers have thousands of dollars of software and hardware at their disposal. The initial investment in all the software that one would require to create a successful and professional website and then maintain that website later on is huge. Not only is it cheaper to have a professional website designer put your website together you can take advantage of the tools they have at their fingertips.
Technology
In today’s world of website design there are tons of different technologies and frameworks that you can build your website on. Do you use static HTML or go with something more dynamic and scalable such as PHP or ASP? What about components such as AJAX or technologies such as XML? What about interactive flash elements requiring Actionscript? What about customizing online shopping packages or blogs or podcasting feeds? Almost every site can benefit from these technologies. In fact, to create a search engine friendly website, you will need to some of these technologies added to your site and used correctly. So how do you incorporate them into your site alone?
Deployment
Once the site is designed the issues comes to publishing your website to the Internet. This sounds easy but this is where the real headaches can begin. It would seem that website hosts are a dime a dozen but finding the right host for the right price and offering the right technologies and servers is a huge project. Every hosting company out there has a different hosting package that includes different features, technologies and restrictions. Experience with the technologies you used on your site and the Operating Systems and server technology you will require to run it is a must here.
Once again relying on a experienced and Professional Website Designer will solve this problem and headache because he or she will know what your site requires and where to find servers to run it.
Website Marketing
Internet and Website Marketing is overlooked by most business owners and sadly the majority of almost all web designers and firms. Once the site is designed, it’s important that it be search engine optimized, marketing and publicised. This is a daunting challenge and feat in itself. Without the proper knowledge of what to do and how to go about doing it, it is impossible. You can spend days and weeks reading articles and books on SEO and Internet Marketing but you will find that many of them contradict each other. The best solution is to once again rely on a experienced, proven and professional Internet Marketing Firm
Experience
The biggest and largest hurtle to overcome is experience. Experience cannot be learned overnight. Any good quality and experienced website designer will know exactly what needs to be done to produce a attractive, quality and successful website.
Unless you have experience in website design, you site will not succeed. It is only by experience, expertise, and knowledge of the industry that you can design a site that will stand the test of time on the Internet, thrive, and become successful enough that it makes money. If you have never done it before it will take a lot of time, money, research, and lots and lots of cups of coffee to gain the knowledge of a skilled, reputable, website designer. Just because someone knows some of the basics of website design, does not automatically make them an expert website designer.
Most Business Owners Eventually Fall Back to the Professionals
In the long run, most business that design a website themselves, either shut them down or eventually hire a company like Advertising Solutions, Inc. to point them in the right direction.
The easiest, most cost effective thing to do is to hire a real web site designer and marketing firm that will take the time and honestly tell you what you should do, without wasting your money, time, or resources… a company like us.
Tags: designing your own site, internet marketing, myths, online shopping, professional website design, search engines, website design
I know exactly what you mean. I had my site designed professionally at first but then I decided to host it myself. I gave it to my brother in law to take care of and in a matter of a month the site was in pieces. The host we used was also horrible. Within a few weeks I went back to my old designer and the site has been there ever since. It’s been about 5 years now and we have not had a single complaint. Never again will I go back to trying it ourselves.
Hey guys. Great blog. I was looking for some info on search engine optimization but these myths you have on hear caught my eye and they are interesting. I wanted to share my story with you.
We designed our site last year. We spent about $3000 buying the programs we needed. It took a couple weeks to get the site together but we did get it done and put it online. We were happy until we started to get complaints from clients saying that they could not view the site. It turns out we used some codes we found online and they made the site produce errors. We had a designer contact us and for about $300 they fixed the problems and even improved the design.
I wish we had just hired someone to begin with. It would have been cheaper.
By the way I have a question. How heavily do search engines rely on keywords and description tags? A lot of people say they are important but some have said I dont even need them. Which is it?
Thanks so much!
-CJ
Hi CJ. Thank you for the comments.
Some search engines ignore the meta tags such as description and keywords while others read then. They are not as important as they once were years ago but they certainly still are important to include and get right. By far the most important meta tag is the title keyword. You know the one. Its the one that goes:
<title>Your title here</title>So yes, place good titles, descriptions and keywords into you pages. For those who say the are not important.. they have no clue what they are saying. Just remember that SEO does not stop there. Content content content is one of the biggest keys.