Building your own website?
Then you need to read our website review series and learn how to get it right from the start (and not end up someone’s website rescue project).
Maybe you’re thinking you can save some cash by building your own website, so here you are researching how the heck to even get started.
Being in the website building business, you may assume we’re a bit biased…
And maybe we are, but hear me out! At Blue Steele Solutions, we’ve rescued more than our fair share of clients’ DIY projects (and we have the scars to prove it.)
Building Your Own Website Means Making Good Decisions All On Your Own
This is the first major roadblock we see people hit when they decide to build their own site. There are so many decisions to make and no one to help make them.
You see, when a professional builds your website, they’re giving you more than code and pictures for a fee. You’re buying access to their experience and expertise—you lose all that when building your own website.
Even the most basic site based on a template design requires many decisions to be made.
- What technology will you use to build and manage your site?
- What layout works best for your content, audience, and brand?
- What content do you need to include, and where should it go?
- What do you want people to do on your site? And how will you get them to do it?
- What does success even look like for your website? How do you know if your time spent building this site has even paid off? And how do you measure that success?
This is just the tip of the decision iceberg—you’ll have to make a lot of decisions—alone—when building your own website.
Wait, Don’t You Already Have a Job?
My first salary position was as the sole marketing person at a software company. I’d spent the previous two years contracting my way through college at Fortune 500 companies. This job was my first chance to actually see budgets and just how much we were paying for outside services.
When I saw the quote to build a brand new site for our company, I was shocked. Why on earth would you spend thousands of dollars on a new website when building your own website costs next to nothing?! I knew some html and I’d thrown together a Joomla! site in one of my college classes. I had the design chops—I could build it myself?
Now, for me, this was the smartest move I ever made. Learning to build that site from scratch set in motion a chain of events that eventually led me to where I am today—running my own marketing firm that builds a whole lot of websites.
But, I’m guessing you don’t have “start business building websites” on your bucket list. You already have a lot to do… like run a business.
You see, I thought I was giving my company a free website by building it myself, but building your own website is costlier than that.
What I really did was cost them months of my time and salary. Other parts of my job were put on hold while I learned how to make my drop-down menus look just right.
Who’s going to do your job while you struggle through building your own website?
Building Your Own Website With a Site Builder?
There are some easy-to-use, beautiful-looking site builders available right now. Building your own website and making it look great has never been easier. And if that’s really all you want — then I say go for it. Wix it up, Square Your Space, Weeble til you wobble — really, go for it!
But — if you want your website to actually do something for your business, if you want it to represent your brand, to speak directly to your ideal customers, to actually generate leads — then you should really think twice.
Website builders won’t help you determine your audience. They won’t teach you about what a call to action is, why you need one, and what that call to action should be. They won’t tell you that your content doesn’t make sense to your potential customers and help you restructure it so that it does.
And they certainly won’t steer you in the right direction when you start to pick a template that doesn’t represent your brand — that’s the risk you take when building your own website.
Oh, and those website builders. They also won’t let you own your site—one of the biggest drawbacks to building your own website.
If you ever want to add functionality they don’t offer — you’ll be stuck. If they raise their monthly rates and you feel you’re paying too much — your only option will be to start over and build something new. And if one day they happen to get denied a round of funding and have to shut down their business — your website will go right down with them.
You Can Get the Website You Need Without Building Your Own Website, Even on a Small Budget
Listen, I know your pockets aren’t always deep. I understand having a small budget and struggling to stick to it. As a fellow small business owner, I feel your pain.
We created an affordable website solution for people just like you. For $1500, you get a person to answer your questions and guide you to the right decisions. You get a website that is set up, loaded with your content and ready to start working for you. You get the peace of mind that you own your own website, and you can take it to any host you like.
And, you get hands-on training to ensure you can manage your site yourself, keeping your monthly costs to a minimum. Sounds much better than building your own website, eh?
These affordable websites are built on the same structure as our custom websites — meaning it can scale with you as your business grows and changes. You won’t have to start over, you’ll just keep building on top of the infrastructure you already have.
If you’re a small business on a tight budget but you’re ready to make a long-term investment in your marketing strategy, an affordable website just might be a perfect fit for you.
Click the button to see how our affordable website solution works and what it can do for your business (you know, instead of building your own website and getting a massive headache).
