Considering using a DIY Website Builder? Here are some questions you really should ask yourself before going down that route.
Will it Look Professional?
It may well be quick and, initially, easy to throw a site together, but will it look professional? More importantly, will it make you look professional? If the website looks clunky or amateurish, that can dictate the opinion prospective customers have of you. Not a great start!
Will it be Unique?
So you’ve found a template and theme that really suits your business. That’s great, but what if your competitors do the same. Imagine ending up with a website that looks like a rip off of your main competitor. Yuck!
And if you go for the ‘free’ option, you usually don’t even get a choice of domain names. How will that look to your clients?
Do You Have Control of your Site?
If you use a website builder, you are constrained to the tools and options available. If you want something specific to your site, or something special to make your site stand out, it’s either impossible or expensive.
Who Owns your Site?
Once you’ve invested time and effort into building your website, you should be aware that you probably won’t own any it. The pages, the data, the domain name will all reside on one company’s server and you may find it costly (if not impossible!) to move them if you decide to move or upgrade to a new service.
Will it Perform?
Your site will probably share a server with thousands of other similar sites – the servers are designed to maximise income for the provider, not to optimize performance for your site. If you have a very basic, single page site it’ll probably be OK. If it isn’t, there won’t be anything you can do about it!
Will it Work on Mobile devices?
The answer to this is “Yes” … although the full answer is probably “Yes, but it will look awful and be barely usable”.
Mobile access to your site is hugely important, and should be designed-in, not added on as an afterthought.
What About Search Engine Optimisation?
One of the main points of having a website is the online promotion of your business. You want your site and products to feature in search results pages – for searches that are relevant to your business.
This is achieved through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and is affected not only by the content of the individual pages but by the structure and coding of the site.
You may also want to build in some site analytics to understand the performance of your site - and all this is almost impossible to achieve on template built sites.
Is It The Best Use of Your Time?
Do you want to tinker with websites? Or do you want to spend time working at what you do best, and serving your customers.
You could lose days and weeks of your time sorting website issues – it shouldn’t be your problem. Leave it to the pros!
The Bottom Line - Will it save you money?
Well, they are cheap. However, that cheapness could be massively offset by the money you’re losing as customers lose confidence, trust or interest in your website – and by extension, your business!
The Best of Both Worlds
At Webnetism we use our own, purpose built CMS (Content Management System) which means, simply, you get the best of both worlds – a modern, slick, purpose-built and professionally designed website and the ability to update and create your own content, and manage your eCommerce products.
Our sites are “SEO friendly”, and will responsively adapt to mobile devices and be fully accessible.
Not only that, you will get the benefit of our experienced team of designers, programmers and web experts who can help you to build and manage your brand and online presence. If you need any special features on your website, we can build them!
We’re always on hand with a full support and hosting package so you don’t need to worry about any of the technical stuff.
Give us a call, and let us tell you more about what a professional, bespoke website can do for your business.
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