Web Design

DIY Website or Professional Web Designer?

In addition to building your website yourself and doing all that advanced Web Design work, you can hire an experienced web designer to do the work for you. If you are building a company website then this can save you a huge amount of time and allow you to focus on your business instead. So what are the pros and cons of both of these approaches to getting your site built? Here are some things to think about.

Pros and Cons of DIY Website

DIY Website

The Pros of DIY Website

You can save yourself a huge amount of money over hiring a Professional Web Designer. Professionals tend to charge high rates for their service, though admittedly they do so because they have the Web Design skills required to do a professional job. You can make a site fairly easily using WordPress. You’ll need the skills to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on the site to ensure you get the best value from it though. You’ll have more freedom to experiment with the site’s design and functionality over time. Hiring a professional to make tweaks to your site will require a lot of communication with them to get the site tweaked how you want it.

The Cons of DIY Website

Both a professionally developed website and a DIY website can take some time but depending on the complexity this may take days, weeks, or even months of your time. You need to have all the basic knowledge required to build a site before you can begin.

Depending on the approach you wish to take this may involve installing and configuring a content management system like WordPress or it may involve coding and designing the browser and server-side versions of the site yourself from scratch. In the latter case, you’ll probably need to know how to code in HTML, Javascript, PHP, and MySql for a fairly basic site. You’ll also need to do all the site design or integrate a third-party template and make sure your site is responsive.

The functionality and look of the website will be limited by your own Web Design skills and knowledge. A Professional Web Designer will have advanced skills and experience which will allow them to build a more diverse and functional range of sites than you will likely be able to.

With a DIY website you will probably be limited to the range of templates available either for free or commercially unless you can design the site’s theme yourself. By using third party templates you will end up with a look for your site that will likely be used by other site owners who bought the same template.

You’ll need to do all the SEO work required for the site yourself. Unless you have advanced SEO skills it’s unlikely you’ll be able to optimize the site to the degree that a professional can.

Pros and Cons of hiring a Professional Web Designer

Professional Web Designer

Pros of hiring a Professional Web Designer

A Professional Web Designer will have in-depth knowledge of the best way to build a site so that the flow of the user experience ensures that any visitor gets the maximum value from your site. This also ensures that you get the maximum value from that visit.

Your website will likely be built so that it works the way you need it to the first time around. They will have experience with the more common pitfalls of building and optimizing a site that the average person doesn’t know about, and will be able to avoid those pitfalls.

A Professional Web Designer will have mastered a variety of Web Design and development technologies or will be able to hire reputable sub-contractors to do any specialized work building and designing your site. This provides you with the option to create a more advanced site than you would be able to if you were building it yourself.

They can have an extensive SEO experience and ability to optimize your site to ensure that search engines can parse and index it as accurately as possible. They can also optimize it to take advantage of as many popular search terms as possible that relate to what your site is about.

Cons of hiring a Professional Web Designer

Professionals charge professional rates. This means that they will cost you a lot more than if you were to build the site yourself. On the flip-side, you are paying those rates for professional quality work.

Working with a Professional Web Designer involves some extended communication to ensure that they have as clear an idea as possible of what you want from your site. This can be time-consuming. On the other hand, you can learn a lot from this communication.

As a general rule, if you want a professionally built business website then you should hire a Professional Web Designer. For simpler sites though you can get away with a DIY Wesite and save yourself a lot of money in the process. This can be great if you are doing Web Design for a hobby site or an experimental website where you need a lot more control over the web design process.

Once you are ready to set your site live though you will probably be better off using a Professional Web Designer to polish and optimize the website so that it gets the maximum value for the work you put into it. So think carefully about what your best option is to ensure your site has the greatest chance to succeed.

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