So you have decided your business needs a website, or your existing website needs a revamp, and you’ve started to look into the options that are open to you.
Your thought process may go something like this,
Option 1 Do It Yourself (D-I-Y) and create a website yourself (no cost!)
Option 2 Ask a friend who is ‘in to computers’ to create a website (almost no cost!)
Option 3 Pay a website developer to develop a website (ah, a cost!).
Now, clearly we are biased on this subject, we want your business, but let me explain.
If you have a viable and popular business that you want to expand – and the demographic for your product or service uses the internet, then please consider carefully when making your choice. Now of course your choice will be based on the revenue your business generates – if it’s a part-time or ‘hobby’ business with the turnover of a few thousand pounds a year, having a professionally designed website is not going to be viable – otherwise read on.
Option 1: D-I-Y Websites
So you are thinking about ‘Doing It Yourself and creating a website’. Now I’m rather good at D-I-Y around the house. It took 15 years of practice (or as my partner calls it ‘trial and error’) before I got to the point where I could have a go at something, and get a good result by the end of it. There were many bodges, kludges and disasters along the way, including the involuntary emptying of a hot water tank through the ceiling. I know my limitations, and for certain jobs I will get a professional in as they a can do a job for less money than if I did it myself. Hold on I hear you say, how can employing a professional be cheaper than Doing It Yourself? Well, here’s an example, we needed new radiator valves throughout, I knew I could do it, but it’d probably have taken me two of three days of work + the mopping up and leaks afterwards. Our friendly plumber did the job in 5 hours, no leaks, and sourced the new components at trade-price. For me to do have done this job, it would have been at least three days away from earning money, plus the cost of buying the components at full retail price (plus the likely replacement cost of most of the carpets).
It is the same when it comes to websites – just how much lost revenue would it cost your business if you took time out from running the business to create a a website? A week, a month, six months? And who will be running your business whilst you are doing this?
Now there are many different ways to D-I-Y a website. Various ‘D-I-Y’ website companies make bold claims about their services, such as a compete website can be set up by a complete novice in a few of hours. The companies that provide these services come in various shapes and forms – some allow you to drag and drop boxes and logos to build your site, others ask you to fill in the blanks on a predefined template.
Generally most of these D-I-Y websites and their services fall down in several common areas
- Difficulty of tailoring the website to your corporate branding for colour and design
- Overloaded servers with tens of thousands of websites all running from the same box
- Technical Support taking days, weeks and even months to respond to a query
- Using a D-I-Y Website Company locks you into that one company for the lifetime of the website – you cannot transfer your site to an alternative company
- Some D-I-Y Companies rely on something called ”Flash Technology’ rather than a traditional Website design to build the site – meaning that on many computers the website won’t display correctly, if at all
- If the D-I-Y website company ceases trading or they accidentally delete your your website – your content will gone and be lost forever … even if they sent you a ‘copy’ it could not be used elsewhere. It’s happened many times in the past and will happen again in the future.
Now the D-I-Y Websites aren’t all bad – there are some great web developers that specialise in using these D-I-Y websites – and they get some fantastic results … but you’re then back to option ’3′ which is to pay a website developer to create the site for you, but with the limitation of the D-I-Y company, which is a just lose-lose situation for you.
2. Ask a friend who is ‘in to computers’ to create a website
This is probably one of the most tempting options – your friend claims to be an expert website developer (yet he/she does not have a portfolio…everyone has to start somewhere, right?) and will create a website for in return for a modest outlay of beer money.
What could ever go wrong? Well, probably everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
Case Study 1 – An acquaintance of ours created a site for a product – what they have done looks great … but they have made so many design errors that Google and other search engines could not read the site. If the client had relied on the website to generate sales they’d have had no business and no sales (just as a footnote … we’ve told them … and they are in progress of fixing it).
Case Study 3 – A business near to us has a website, it’s a nice family business, popular with the locals. Their website is an explosion of clipart, fonts, and more colours than Dulux. Their revenue generating area is hidden away two menu layers away from the front page. The contact information is sparse, and the website does not mirror their corporate branding. To be honest – this business just needs three pages maximum to get their message across and generate additional revenue – yet someone has spent hundreds of hours with FrontPage Express and free clipart collections hoping that the end result would generate sales.
Then what happens when the Friend decides that keeping your website up to date is no longer fun, and the beer money that was offered for the original setup is no longer such an attractive option? They then charge you a commercial rate for what is effectively a poor quality website – you are effectively held to ransom. They have registered the domain name, they own all the code, and no formal contract was entered into. The only thing to do is to pay up, or start again.
Finally – your Friend probably doesn’t apply security to the website, and it is very unlikely that they have made a backup of the site, so should the website server fail, or the hosting company goes into liquidation – then everything is lost.
3. Pay a website developer to develop a website design for you
If you have a viable and popular business – then please engage with a professional website development company. Get a quote, actually get several quotes, and remember to compare like with like. No two quotes will be identical, and each website company will have a different approach to your needs and offer different solutions.
Also make note that some developers pass off a Portfolio of work done by others. To check that the sites they claim are actually part of their active portfolio, scroll to the bottom of the claimed website and look for a credit/link to the folks that actually run and designed the site … it should match. If it doesn’t – run away fast and don’t look back.
Some quotes may be inexpensive, some quotes will be out of this world – the best way to look at it is to work out the total cost of ownership over a three year period. An inexpensive quote may have costly ongoing monthly fees, an expensive quote may provide a site with lesser ongoing fees. Try to to avoid a company offering no ongoing fees – offering free hosting and a free domain name is not a sustainable business model, it means that all new business subsidies existing websites. Do you really want to pay an upfront fee and for part of that fee to go towards subsidising someone elses website?
About Us
We are a small company – we use reliable servers, we limit the number of new projects that take on at any one time, and we are responsive to your needs.
We use off-the-shelf technology, if you decide in time to move to a different developer – that’s fine, for a fee we can transfer the entire site to the new developer, something you can’t do with options 1 or 2 above.
Finally – we’ve been making websites for fun since the late 1990′s, it’s not something we’re going to stop any time soon. We find it interesting, challenging, and rewarding – we’ve looked at the competition, we’re cheaper, we can work smarter, and will provide you with a well priced solution that will meet your business need.
Please click here to learn more about The Mayne Design.
