Are you wondering whether you should design your own business website, or hire a website design service instead ? There are obvious attractions to designing your own website. Ultimately your decision will come down to a trade off between, time, cost and new skills required.

Designing my own business website will be cheaper, right?

Designing your own website may save on perceived costs, since you do not pay for professional web design services. The real cost depends on how much you value your own time. It will take a lot longer for you to get similar results to professional web design services. So factor in the potential 100's of hours you will spend to make your site effective. That being said, many start-up businesses may not have the marketing budget to get the benefits of professional website design, so you may have to consider how your marketing dollar is best spent and do your best at the rest.

How long will it take?

It is very hard to predict how long a DIY website will take, the complexity of the site being built, and the skills of the DIY website designer are major factors. If you decide a business website will take you 2 months and it turns out to be 6 months what is the consequence? There are risks that the selected CMS for the website doesn't work how you hoped, or technical issues slow down progress when new skills are required. If there is a particular timeframe or event to coincide with the website launch, hiring a professional will help you meet the deadlines.

What do I need to know to build a successful website?

Fortunately, there are tools available that make it much easier for those with limited technical knowledge to create their own web pages. Content management systems have come a long way. The three most popular are Joomla!, Wordpress, and Drupal. Wordpress is the easiest for blog websites, but is not easily expandable for advanced features like ecommerce. Joomla! is very powerful and relatively easy to use. Drupal is less intuitive, more suited to experienced web designers. To achieve the website design you want, you will still need to do some programming, although not as much as the olden days of hand-coded websites.

The skills required to design successful websites is quite broad, several programming languages, graphic design, usability, cross-browser compatibility, website content writing, and Google SEO to name a few. Because of this designing a website which looks professional and gets results will require a serious time commitment. If you have little familiarity and experience with modern web design and programming, this can be quite daunting and frustrating at times. Having said that there is a large amount of technical knowledge shared on website design forums and online courses. Get ready for some acronyms like HTML, CSS, PHP, FTP.... (See our Website and Internet Glossary). If you are inexperienced, there will be key things you miss and have to rework as part of the learning curve. If you have the budget you will get better results hiring a professional, and concentrating on your core business.

What about using a business website template?

Website templates are a great head start, if you find one that aligns with your business branding. Website templates built for popular content management systems will save a substantial amount of time, as long as there is minimal customization needed. A professional look can be achieved while minimizing the amount of graphic design and coding required. There are many templates designed for modern open source CMS's like Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.

Many template websites do not maintain their templates, so be careful picking an old template, as it may be less usable and compatible with current CMS versions.

What about online website builders?

Because online website builders are based on proprietary (not the popular open source) CMS's, they are not portable between hosts, and web designers if you need help, or consider changing hosting companies. Be wary of "Build your own website online in 15 minutes!" offers. The tools are often quite limited, and therefore difficult to customise, let alone search engine optimize. Carefully check the hosting and support costs of "Build your own website online for $199" type deals. Some companies use a subdomain (ie yourbusiness.webcompany.com.au) for your website. This way all the work you do to get noticed in the search engines will benefit them, and when you move to your own domain, you effectively start again.

Where should I start?

If you decide to build your own website, the features required for your website will come into play. A blog style website may be achievable, but for a novice, a full blown ecommerce website design is very risky. Keep it simple! Make sure you can afford to make the time commitment. Web surfers will notice an unprofessional or unfinished design and stay away.

• Do purchase your own domain
• Do use a business website template
• Do use a popular open source CMS (Joomla or Wordpress)
• Do plan for unexpected delays

If professional results in a minimum period of time is desirable, but budget is limited, our one page website, or business website package provide a great return on your investment. Because we maintain hosted websites, your website can cheaply adopt future features and functions as your business grows.