You built it and they didn’t come. What you need to consider when building your own website!
Building a website has never been more accessible or consumer friendly. With the rise of web builders like Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy and others, many small business owners jump at the change to ‘save costs’ by creating a website themselves.
Are you really saving money taking the DIY approach?
In the short term, and looking through a purely transactional lens, you can argue that you are. Depending on what you need, you have ‘saved’ yourself a few thousand dollars at this point. What happens next is where this ‘saving’ can turn into a headache.
A business tool vs a static presence
Every great website needs a great user experience and quality content; words, imagery, video etc. Some industries require a heavy emphasis on quality imagery, others may require an emphasis on creative copywriting but most require all of the above.
The content is important on many fronts, including driving traffic to the site, engaging visitors once they visit and helping to convert visitors to customers.
You’ll need great imagery to make that ever important first impression (particularly if you are running an e-commerce business) but this also extends to highly visual industries like hospitality, hair dressing, builders and accommodation providers. If your site is going to be a genuine business tool, you are far better to engage a professional to design and build your site from the ground up. A digital website agency (like Ipswich Websites) will provide tailored advice and design the site to be a real business tool that attracts the right traffic and makes a great first impression.
Ongoing maintenance and integration into advertising platforms
The next major thing to consider is if you can invest the time into maintaining your own site, and integrate other things down the track, such as tracking codes for digital ads or integrating a payment gateway. Not all platforms are built the same, and if you find yourself requiring assistance to add a new feature or be found for the right keywords, you might come unstuck if your earlier decision to ‘save money’ is a website builder comes back to haunt you due to limited feature sets or plugin options. Do you have the time and expertise to build custom landing pages for digital campaigns, implement tracking and setup reporting?
As you can see, there could possibly be longer term business consequences for taking the DIY approach instead of working with a dedicated website agency when building your site.
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