 Advice for the
Do-it-Yourselfer—
DON'T!
This economy has begun to read like a bad-news, good-news story. The bad news is the economy still stinks. The good news is it means entrepreneurship is on the rise as people strike out on their own. Unfortunately (bad news again), few companies have the cash to properly invest in their businesses.
In this era of non-existent marketing budgets, everyone's trying to save a buck. So for the solopreneur or small business owner ready to launch a first-ever website, the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach holds a lot of appeal.
Designed with Non-Designer in Mind? Not So Much!
Let's face it, there are plenty of easy-to-use tools to help you get a basic website up and running in short order. Tools like Yahoo Site Builder offer a range of preformatted templates users can instantly plug their content into, and lately it seems everyone's jumping on the WordPress bandwagon. And it's obvious why—people enjoy the flexibility and freedom of being able to change their content at will without going through a web designer.
. . . But there's a very painful tradeoff to all this freedom as well.
Most simple online design tools are so basic they offer limited ability for customizing design or functionality—and you end up with a website that doesn't look like your branding or doesn't work the way you want. Or you'll spend countless frustrated hours learning more advanced techniques, so you can achieve the right results.
The reality is that when you take on the task of doing your own website, expect to wear a lot of hats. Suddenly you're not just the chief cook and bottle washer of your own company, but now you're also the designer, copywriter, web administrator, SEO guru and usability expert—and you may easily be in over your head (especially if you don't even know what some of those tasks are.)
As a frugal solopreneur (just call me Princess Pennywise), I appreciate the need to manage the bottom line, but sometimes the cost of doing it yourself is just too…uh costly. By saving money with the DIY approach, you're actually creating a false economy, where it may end up costing you more in the process when you have to hire an expert to redo what you couldn't make work.
D-I-Y is a P-I-A
Just the other day a client of mine called in a panic saying, "Help! I know just enough of this technical stuff to be dangerous!" She abruptly hit the wall of her limited ability to act as her own web administrator, deleting her own website in the process of moving it from one host to another.
What they don't tell you with all these cool tools is that designing and managing websites is still pretty complex stuff, and there's so much more to it than popping up a templated format. Do you know if you can add meta descriptions or if page titles are editable? Will your site automatically be submitted to the major search engines? Did you develop keyword-rich content, so you'll rank higher in the search engine results pages? What you don't know about web design can hurt you—or at least the impression you're trying to make and your ability to attract more customers.
Take it from The Princess, rare is the DIY website that doesn't look homemade, isn't poorly organized, difficult to navigate, impossible to search for or simply incomplete. Case in point, the collaborative law group that never changed the templated words on their launched site from, "Insert your website slogan here."
You Can't Have it All With Cheap Design
...."But I just want to make a couple of quick changes myself."
Uggghhhh!! These are the words that make any web designer shudder, and I've been hearing it more and more frequently from clients and business owners.
People seem to want it all ways. They want doing their website to be effortless, they want their site to look great, they want to be able to tweak it whenever they want, and they want to do it for free (or as close to free as possible). Unfortunately, I have to tell them, you can't have it all.
Let me introduce the concept of the “quality triangle” (also known as the reality triangle, the tradeoff triangle, and even more appropriately, the impossible triangle).
In any endeavor, in any business, there are three characteristics you can choose from—doing it fast, cheap or good—but you can only pick two. The third characteristic must always be compromised. If you're doing your website yourself, doing it on the cheap and putting it up quickly, count on the quality suffering.
Invest in Your Website for Higher Returns
As a web professional, I know I'm biased, but the old cliche is true, you get what you pay for. And if you do a website on the cheap, you end up with a cheap website. And no matter how tight the bottom line, you really can't put a price on having a website that looks professional and actually attracts business.
When you hire a web designer, copywriter or SEO professional to help you with your site, you're not just buying the hours it takes to complete your project, you're buying their expertise and experience to ensure the project is done correctly the first time. Whether it's developing the code that makes your site look right on every computer or writing the content that entices people to buy or optimizing your site for search engines so people can find you, behind the scenes an expert is quietly dealing with the issues that you don't even realize exist.
Here's to your marketing success!
Laurie Lonsdorf
The Princess of Persuasion |
