Monday, December 3, 2012

Should You Make Your Own Website?


Asking whether or not if you should make your own website is such a wide-open question because there are many factors to consider before making a decision.

Before we explore some of the rabbit holes this discussion could take us, I'd like you to ponder if you believe making a website is more of a professional vocation or something most can do.

As you might expect, I'm going to be a little biased towards professional vocation because, well, that's what I do for a living. Nonetheless, I'll try to be open-minded and discuss both options.

Professional Vocation

Regardless of vocation, the desired outcome is about the end product achieving the desired goal. A 12-year-old can build a soap box derby racer, but it will never win the Indianapolis 500.

A website is only one component that makes up a successful internet presence. The intended outcome may not be achieved even if one component is not operating at maximum potential.

In the early days of the Internet, a website could easily be found because there weren't too many of them and the search engines weren't very sophisticated about ranking websites in their index.

Today there are over 370,000,000 websites and the fight to the top of a search engine result is very fierce.

The Internet is constantly evolving and keeping up with its requirements requires expenditures of time, money, and effort. It's reasonable to infer that a professional will be more up-to-date with internet standards and search engine requirements, and thus better able to incorporate as many of the techniques in a website to obtain optimal search engine ranking.

I will agree that the average person can build a basic website just as a 12-year-old can build a soap box derby racer. But if you want a website to perform at its maximum potential, like an Indy racer, then you either need to possess the necessary skills or hire a professional to do the job.

Do-it-Yourself

The technology is available for the average person to make their own website. There are numerous drag-n-drop website builder services that can guide you through the construction of a basic website.

For the most part, these online services provide the basic features (contact form, photo gallery, simple shopping cart) a website owner may need. If your website needs to perform more specialized or sophisticated functions, then you would have to pay the service to program these functions.

The do-it-yourselfer can also make their own website by using tools like WordPress and free to low-cost templates, but this requires a little more knowledge, time and effort. Again, you're making a basic website, and if you need more sophisticated processes, then you'll need to understand how WordPress plugins work and which ones to incorporate.

There's no doubt you can save money making your own website, but it will take you more time to create it, and definitely longer to achieve its optimum potential.

Conclusion

If you want a basic website where traffic to it will be generated by paid advertising or word of mouth, then you can probably do it yourself. I would not expect any visitors from search engine searches unless you are capable of performing search engine optimization on your website.

If you want more sophisticated functions from your website, then you'll either need to learn how to program or buy the necessary components.

I'll end with my initial analogy. If you want a soap box derby racer, then you can make your own website. If you want to compete in the Indianapolis 500, then you need a professional.

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1 comments:

  1. Just got my cheque for $500.

    Many times people don't believe me when I tell them about how much you can get by taking paid surveys online...

    So I show them a video of myself actually getting paid over $500 for taking paid surveys.

    ReplyDelete


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