In an effort to save money, many small business owners decide to build their own web design using one of the many website builder tools currently available. These programs can make putting up a website faster than working with actual website designers - but at what cost?
Before choosing a DIY site builder over custom web design, consider the things you won't get when DIYing your own website that you can get from professionals.
Effective and Attractive Design
Anyone can build a web design they find attractive by using a website builder. Unless you have actual design experience, your design may not help your business attract website traffic that leads to increased sales. Good design follows current industry and design trends.
A website must effectively incorporate color schemes, layout, function, navigation, and many other details to serve business needs and help your company grow. Based on needs that differ for every business, they cannot be served using a template or DIY tool; website designers offer much more.
With a wealth of knowledge regarding current trends and technologies as well as an understanding of how color, typeface, and other aesthetic details can affect website results, professional designers are critical to website development.
Essential and User-Friendly Function
Identifying what a website must do and how it must do it to be user-friendly is another essential element in effective custom web design. Website builder tools don’t give you many options in terms of navigation menus, content management, and other essential functions that must cater to your specific audience.
Poorly functioning websites that are hard to use are a leading cause of bouncebacks, abandoned shopping carts, and loss of audiences in general.
On-Site Optimization and SEO Knowledge
One of the essential elements of a successful web design is on-site optimization that builds SEO and achieves good pagerank in the SERPs. As most website designers well know, SEO is not easy to manage.
From a custom web design aspect, SEO requires an understanding of back-end optimization, page elements, and formatting that increases web crawling and indexing. It also means the skillful use of keywords within the core structure of the site and many other SEO techniques.
Site builder tools provide none of this. You can build a site with these tools but then what? For anyone to find your website in the search engines, it requires careful SEO planning and management from the site planning level forward.
Troubleshooting and Customer Support
In addition to the other significant reasons why a custom professional design is a better option than using a site builder, you also get customer support when you work with designers. No matter what happens with your site, there is a trained, knowledgeable person available to troubleshoot the problem and correct it.
The support that comes with site builder tools is much more limited and requires you to do all the troubleshooting to determine the problem. This can be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive for non-professionals.
Using a website builder can be less expensive, maybe faster than working with professional website designers. Still, what you must keep in mind is what you are truly getting or not getting in both cases. Professional web design experts the knowledge and skills that you cannot get with a builder tool.
Because professional web designers understand everything from the effectiveness of colors to essential SEO, custom web design pays for itself many times over!
