You can see advertisements for DIY website builders anywhere from television to Youtube. Does a DIY website builder really make promises they can’t keep? When you should go to a DIY website builder and when should you hire a professional for website development?
DIY Website Builders: The Upsides
You won’t have to pay a ton of money to build a website design using a DIY builder. They offer you a lot of website templates. The software you get from these companies is also simple and easy to use. You won’t have to pay a lot of money for web hosting. Oftentimes, it’s free. When you use a DIY website builder, you can make use of add-ons that will allow you to put contact forms, newsletters, and social feeds on your website.
These builders have their own proprietary code. That means that the only website development professionals working on this software are the developers that work for the builder’s company. This is a good thing as these website design professionals know the software in and out. That means that if you ever have an issue, they can easily fix it. The developers who work for these DIY web builder companies can also deal with software updates, they have sites that are mobile-friendly, and the sites don’t use Flash, which can make for less-than-optimal user experiences. Lastly, you can do your own website design on your own time, day or night.
Those people and businesses who don’t have a large budget can get a lot out of DIY website design builders. You can easily access them, they don’t cost a lot of money, and many of these website development templates look great.
When You Should Use a Website Development Pro
If your website needs a lot of customization, expertise, and support, you might want to hire a website design expert. Your website will act as the best marketing tool for your business. Design experts know how to get your brand’s message across to your potential customers. Things such as colors, calls-to-action, and the placement of content all determine how visitors will perceive your website and business. If you create a website that doesn’t work for you and your business, that will act as a big waste of money. By creating a business site that aligns with your goals and brand, it will pay for itself before long.
Website Design
With popular DIY website builders, you create a site using one of their templates. However, you can’t really customize the look of your site. If you want to use a website design pro that’s offered by the company, that may require an expensive upgrade. Plus, the company’s designers may only be able to do so much.
When you hire a website development professional, your options for your site design are practically limitless. A web design expert can create a site that perfectly matches your brand and embed it into a theme that you can easily use. You can also change the look of your business website should you choose to do so in the future. If you do decide to change your site’s look, you won’t have to start from scratch.
Website Development
Whether you use a DIY website builder or go with a web design expert, you can add content to your website easily. But the drag-and-drop interface that comes with most DIY web builders can result in some non-standard code. Search engines and browsers much prefer clean, easy-to-understand code. Having readable code can get your site crawled by Google, which can result in better rankings for your keywords.
When you hire a web design professional, they will put your code where it belongs. The designer will also make sure that the code presents well for search engine optimization purposes. All of this will make it a lot more likely that you will get desirable rankings on Google for your chosen keywords.
When you have to choose between DIY and hiring a web design professional, you might have to select an option based purely on budget. Hiring a web designer may require a significant investment. But if you plan out your website and its goals and talk at length with your designer before any work starts, you can end getting the most for the fee that you pay.
D2 Branding Marketing and Web Design provides website development and customized social media strategies for businesses to capture new customers, interact with current customers, while growing your audience and customer base!