TechAtLast

The evolution of Do It Yourself website development and guidelines to follow!

When you decide to set up a website, the question arises whether to do it yourself on an existing platform or build a brand new site from scratch. There are pros and cons to each approach, and there are situations where one or the other is the better choice based on your needs. Here are the pros and cons of do it yourself website building.

Unbelievable Do It Yourself Website Success Stories

Do It Yourself Website
When it comes to small business website development, there are two options to choose from. Should you do it yourself from scratch or build on an existing platform?

The Pros of Do It Yourself Website Building

Building your own website on a site that provides existing templates allows you to set up a website quickly and using nothing more than your own time.

If you want a basic website to simply be able to put out the digital equivalent of a “for business” sign, only a do it yourself website building project on a major platform will get you up and going in a matter of hours. There’s no need in these cases to buy a domain, spend hours picking out what to upload and then trying to build the site.

If you work in IT, building your own website and being able to state it on your resume is a strong plus. If you are a graphic artist or web designer, your website literally showcases your talent in a way a cookie-cutter web page cannot.

Building your own website, especially a simple one, is cheaper than hiring a professional to do it. It may allow you to save even more money when it is combined with an existing online hosting plan. When the same company supplies the tools to build the site as host it, you don’t have to worry as much about compatibility between the website and the architecture hosting it – and you have someone to call for technical issues.

When you build your own website, updating it occurs on your schedule. If you find you need to make a small change, you can make it immediately.

If you choose the right platform, such as Joomla, you can manage a large scale website with multiple administrators. If you want to set up a dedicated fan page with multiple volunteers, you can now do it yourself at a low cost that may only be the hosting fees.

The Cons of Do It Yourself Website Building

Do It Yourself Guide to Website Development

If you build the site yourself, it may look unprofessional. If the site is there to promote your business, it is the digital equivalent of showing up looking for a storefront and finding a street vendor peddling the product.

When you build a website on a platform designed to make this a plug-and-play process, your website will literally look like hundreds of others. Try to add complexity through plugins you see online or code you try to add to the page, and it may look bad – and when you do it yourself, you don’t have the skills to troubleshoot it. When you try to add more complex functionality to a website yourself, the time spent learning and testing may have been worth more than the cost of hiring a professional to do it in a fraction of the time and knowing it looked right.

Also, if you build the website yourself, you may not have the tools to test it when viewed by users on different mobile devices. And when you build your own website, you may not have the expertise to implement IT security measures that convince customers that it is safe to buy through your portal or sign up for your newsletter.

When you use template-based webpage builders, you may not be able to add the music, images or video files you want. The project may become more complex, like needing to upload how-to videos to YouTube so that you can then embed the YouTube video on your website instead of uploading it directly to the site you’re building. This issue, however, depends on the platform you’re using to build the site, though you avoid it entirely if you hire a professional to build the website.

Why Way Should You Go?

Relying on a professional to build a website doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Hire a coder on a site for everything from minor changes to the whole project and you could have a professional do the work for a reasonable price. The only concerns are hiring someone who actually has the expertise to do the work right and whether or not you trust them to build your site without adding malicious code to your new website.

Do it yourself website building through templates limits your choices from the website structure to types of images that may be used. There may be restrictions on selling items commercially through a blogging platform, while other web hosts may let you sell items but limit the types of items sold. These issues don’t exist if you build your own website as long as you are within the law.

If you build a website through a free tool offered by the web host, they get their money back by ads on your site. These ads may draw away visitors to your site and interfere with your ability to sell to them through your own website.

Building your own website doesn’t mean you cannot add functionality that the top ranking sites have. You can find plugins for your blog or HTML page for social media sharing, an RSS feed, a Twitter feed or a calendar. The limitations of DIY websites come in when you try to add shopping carts, ecommerce pages, and complex multimedia – few people have the skills to do this right themselves on a website unless they are professional programmers and web designers.

Conclusion

Do it yourself website design can be fast if the project is simple, cheaper than hiring a pro and lets you customize the site as you choose. When you hire a professional, it costs more money but you have options limited only by the skills of those you hire. Balance your skills against your needs, and hire a professional for otherwise time-consuming or complex work, but remember, most of us have the ability to use plug and play interfaces to set up a basic website or blog ourselves.

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3 Responses

  1. Cost is the only benefit. However you have to able to use basic software to do it. Anyone car create a website like anyone can cook, but it’ sthe final result that matters.

    1. Yes, you are right! It is not just about designing a website, but building web pages that people would love to visit again and again. The end always justifies the means.

  2. Yes, this is right It is not just about design a website, but building web pages that people would love to visit again and again.

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