…having your tech guy, nephew, cousin, son, daughter, do it for you.
Yes you can save money building your own website. In fact there are many platforms that make it very easy. You have Wix which has become extremely popular, you have WordPress which is now the most popular platform for building sites and there are tons of other options out there.
Your goals and budget ultimately will help you decide which way to go.
If you have more time than money build it yourself. There are a plethora of tutorials online. Go to YouTube you can find just about anything on there.
If you have more money than time than of course have someone else do it. There is no sense in trying to figure out and learn new platforms and then how to continuously update your site if you are finding that you have little spare time.
Now there are many nuances that will differentiate a professional from a hobbyist or someone that isn’t familiar with proper web design and SEO.
For example there are on page and off page factors that can determine the success of your business online.
Building a site isn’t just put the design up and that’s it. At the very least you need to do some basic search engine optimization so that your site can attract visitors. Visitors = Customers = Money. If this is a hobby project it’s not a big deal but if this is your business and way of earning a living you want to stack the deck in your favor as much as possible.
Let’s go through some important things to consider:
Decent looking design. There are sites out their with hideous design that are very successful. These aren’t the norm. You want a decent looking professional presence.
User friendly design. You want visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Site speed. This is a newer ranking factor for Google. They want your site to load fairly quickly. Optimizing images and code are now important for your site.
Mobile friendly design. Another newer ranking factor. Google now does mobile first indexing. Mobile has overtaken desktop searches and site visits. Mobile is one of the most important things that you want to get right.
Other on page factors:
Words on the page. Did you know that you should have a minimum amount of words on your page? A site with just pictures isn’t friendly to the search engines. They use those words for search results.
URL length. You don’t want super long pages.
Title. Properly optimized titles can help ranking your pages and increase click through rate on search engines.
Description. Although this is a hidden factor, this is known to improve click through rate. Click through rate gets you more visitors and is a ranking factor.
Tags. H1, H2, H3 tags used properly can make or break a page.
Alt tags. This tells the search engines what a picture is all about and helps them serve the proper results.
I haven’t even gotten into backlinks, links within pages, social media signals, keyword density, page size, and the over 200 different ranking factors that currently exist.
A simple web design usually isn’t a simple web design. There are many factors that can make or break your site.
Do you want a glorified business card in the digital world or do you want a 24/7/365 marketing machine that can propel your business into the future?
