Should I go it alone, or do I need a guide?
You must have seen the ads offering the ease and cheap price of building your own website with providers like Wix, Squarespace and Weebly, but when is it good to have a go at building your own site and when should you hire a professional?
For start-up businesses or those with budget constraints, a website builder can be the perfect fit. They are easy to set up, often easy to use and the templates used to design your website can make it easy to deliver a professional looking product at a good price.
There is also often free, or reduced cost hosting and support, they are mostly mobile friendly and there are often add-ons that allow you to embed video, create contact forms or add social media. Their development team handles updates so you don’t have to, and support can be excellent. The fact that you can do it all on your own time is also very handy!
However, for larger organisations or people needing additional customisation outside of the builder’s capabilities, or a custom design, employing a WordPress web professional is often the best thing to do for your business. A professional website author will design your website to target the market to which it is intended, from choosing colours, placing content and using calls to action to engage your customers. Your customer’s perception of your business can often be dictated by how you have chosen to present yourself online, so hiring a professional can make all the difference. The difference between a properly executed website and a poorly executed one will show in profits.
Design Constraints
Although the templates from Squarespace and Wix are able to be customised, unless you have a lot of HTML and CSS knowledge and know the platform well, it is quite possible you will wind up with a website that looks remarkably like your competitors, and if you do need to customise it, or pay someone to, why not hire a WordPress professional first anyway?
WordPress is infinitely customisable, with the ability to build your site around your brand, exactly how you wish. A custom theme will support your business as it grows and comfortably aligns with your branding, permitting changes to the theme as your business expands into new areas, without needing to start from scratch as with some of the builders.
Development Issues
Sometimes the interface of the website builders can generate a lot of code, which can negatively affect such things as page load speed and your ability to rank highly for chosen keywords can also be negatively affected as a result, as messy code is not great for search engines. With a WordPress professional all code is kept clean and minimal allowing search engine bots to travel freely throughout your site!
Any add ons and extra functionality your company needs can be provided as WordPress powers up to 40% of the world’s websites at any time, so support and functionality are incomparable.
Pain-free Building
Even if the ads promise a painless experience building your website, there is still a fairly steep learning curve for the novice builder and promised estimates of thirty minutes to build a site can easily turn into a couple of days of tearing your hair out, and then never actually launching the site because of the frustration. Customisation is difficult with a system that only the website builders really know how to change, and if what you need isn’t available, you might find that the quick and easy website is never going to deliver like you had thought.
Hiring a WordPress professional allows you to direct the operation without all the headaches,
Why not pay a professional to do all the heavy lifting?