With all the do-it-yourself web makers on the market you may be asking yourself should I do my website myself.
And for some people, that that may be an option. And when we’re talking about the DIY website platforms are probably the most popular. Right now, Wix and Squarespace are the top DIY platforms. We see a lot of commercials about it. It looks fantastic. And it actually does work very well. You can do a ton of stuff yourself if you’re techy. If you’re not into the technical side you’re not even going to look at that. But some people do like that kind of stuff also have a business. They do have like a little tech side and they kind of enjoy it. And they can use their creativity to make it exactly right.
There is a lot of features that work fairly well. You probably will save some money. But again, like everything else we talked about it’s not for everybody. Generally speaking, when we have these conversations with clients I typically ask them what is it that you do. If it’s air-conditioning’s it’s probably best for you to do the air conditioning aspects. After, let a web designer do the web. Same thing if you’re a mechanic – it’s best for you to do the specific parts of your industry first.
Websites are something that you could find deployed. What happens is it looks and starts off easy. Then you run into little bugs here and there. Or you have things on your site that you since you don’t have the experience and in-depth knowledge, you may not even know that is going on. And you wind up hurting your results more than the cost of having someone do it. As an example, you run into a little bug or a snag – I know because that’s how I started. I wanted to do everything myself. And in retrospect, that should have been initially let a pro do it.
So now I learned more if I get out of my area of expertise. Or unless I’m doing it as a hobby. I get somebody else that can do it better than I and pay for it. You get stuck with a little snag, a little minor detail the next thing you spent the day on it. Even if you didn’t spend the day – three, four or five hours trying to get something resolved. The easy way to calculate that is just add up your time. If you spent five hours on trying to get a margin corrected or a picture centered. You make $15 an hour or $20 an hour then that cost you a hundred bucks to do that. For that, you would’ve paid somebody $50 to do that.
So that’s one of the things you got to take a look at. And the web is getting more complex. It’s always been complex but I think it’s getting a little bit more complex. Because there are more and newer technologies being implemented on sites. Google is being more demanding. So, it really depends on the level of performance that you’re looking for. As a general rule, I recommend that you hire someone out for that kind of stuff. The only exception would be if you’re going to make like a static page, kind of like a showroom. Maybe you just want to do a showroom for a product that you just want people to see, pictures of and go to when you’re doing your own marketing.
You do want to have a place for someone to visit to see your product or some pictures, or maybe you do makeup. You just want to post up all your pictures and want to have a place for that. Then maybe I would go that route. Regardless which route you go always take a look at your investment versus return. So, if you’re doing it yourself keep track of your progress and your time, seeing what that’s costing you. On the same token, you have let’s say the reverse of that. You hire a company and many companies are going to want to do some type of monthly maintenance agreement. I’m not big on that as a general rule because I look at it from the customer side always. It’s a back and forth.
The other side of the coin is that let’s say you hire a company they do the initial work. And then you’re on some type of monthly maintenance plan. Let’s say it’s let’s just say $500 to just use a round number. Now that’s just something out of a hat. So, you pay $500 a month now. If it’s a site that’s kind of static kind of just a little showroom. You don’t have pictures every day and it’s just kind of sitting there. Does that make sense to be paying $500 a month when every three months maybe you’re going to do an update?
So that’s the analysis of every business how much are you putting in. How much are you getting out? Always, always calculate your personal time. People seem to be not calculating how much time they spend doing things themselves. Which cost them more than paying somebody. And the most precious resource you have and you already know where I’m going is your time. You can’t get any more of it.