Should You Create Your Website Yourself or Hire a Professional?

Building a website for your business? I’m sure you have asked yourself the question whether or not you should create it yourself or hire a professional. The good news is that building a website yourself has never been easier. While being proficient in coding may have been required years ago, dozens of simple tools and website builders now exist that will allow you to build your own website without learning how to code. But first, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

1. How complex does your website need to be?

The complexity of your website matters a lot. If all you need is a basic one-page website with your business name, business logo, contact information, about information, etc. then you can absolutely do that yourself. There are many easy-to-use drag and drop website builders and one-page templates you can use to get up and running quickly. On the other hand, if you need advanced functionality like e-commerce, appointment scheduling, and complex forms, then you may consider hiring a professional.

2. How much time do you have?

This is a critical factor that can actually work both ways. On one hand, if you’re in a rush and only need a basic one-page site, then your best bet is probably to do it yourself. On the other hand, if you need your website up quickly and it needs to be complex with a lot of features, then you should probably hire a professional who can get it done faster and more efficiently. Having more time basically gives you the ability to take it slow and build it yourself, or possibly make it less expensive to hire someone since anything that needs to be done quickly tends to cost more.

3. How much do you want to spend?

There’s a misconception that building a website is expensive. The fact is, it has never been cheaper or easier to get online with a website. Website builders such as Squarespace, Wix or Weebly, can cost as little as $10 per month. More expensive platforms such as Shopify for example costs $39 to $399 per month.

That said, even if you plan to hire a professional to build your website, most developers now use templates as a base to get started which significantly reduces the cost compared to building something from scratch. There are thousands of templates available for platforms like WordPress, so there’s really no need to build something from scratch. Depending on how much content you’re adding or customization you need, a good ballpark is about $5,000 to have a website built by a professional developer. Still, a pretty small price to pay for something so fundamental to your business.

4. Are you interested in learning how to do it yourself?

If you’re interested in learning how to build your own website, and if you want to develop some handy skills like HTML and CSS, then rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself could be an adventurous and fun project. You can learn to use plug-ins and apps for setting up advanced functionality, and coding skills for customizing the templates available on website builders.

5. How critical is your website to your business?

Every business should have a website. However, what kind of business you run might determine just how mission-critical your website is. If your website is more for marketing purposes, and you don’t sell anything directly from it, building it yourself is not as risky. If your website must be a finely-tuned conversion machine with 100% uptime, you should probably hire a professional. Amateurs often miss things like slow loading times, 404 errors, search engine optimization, security issues, certificates and other vulnerabilities that can impact the performance of your website.

6. How picky are you?

This is an important one for all you perfectionists out there. If you are the kind of person who would be upset if everything didn’t line up exactly as you want it, if a color was one shade off from what you really want, or if the menu navigation isn’t as slick as you’d like, then you should probably hire a professional. Even website builders, although their templates are great, can cause some frustration if you’re a perfectionist. Templates are not as flexible as some people would like, and unless the website builder gives your access to the code and you know how to edit that code, then it isn’t always easy to make the templates do what you want. So, are you ready to roll up your sleeves and build a website yourself? Or are you going to put it into the hands of an expert? I hope that asking yourself these few key questions will help you make the decision that’s best for your business.