Should You Build Your Own Website or Hire it Out?

Should You Build Your Own Website or Hire it Out?

At the latest count, there are close to 1.37 billion webpages currently online. These sites come in all shapes and sizes, and for the entrepreneurial set the one thing that this figure proves is that it’s a smart idea to have some sort of a web presence for your business. Social networks that offer business pages are useful temporarily, but eventually you’ll want to have your own website. When that time comes, the question is whether you do it yourself, hire out the project or do a little bit of both.

Doing It Yourself

When you set up your web hosting account, you have many decisions to make, from choosing Windows VPS hosting from your provider or going with a Linux distribution, to the type of hosting account that you need for your website. Once you’ve gotten those decisions out of the way, it’s time to look into creating your own website.

If you have some HTML and CSS experience, you may want to go with a coding specific text editor, or simply a basic text editor. If you want more of a helping hand, going with a website building software such as Dreamweaver or a tool offered by your web host may work out better for you. After selecting the tool you want to make your website with, plot out the type of website you want. Do you want an informational page for your business or a full e-commerce portal? Register a domain name with your business brand or a related keyword phrase so it’s relevant to your overall marketing plan.

The advantages to building the website yourself include complete, hands-on control of the product, no worrying about privacy issues and the ability to save money on a developer. If you want to have some assistance, many content management systems have professionally designed website templates you can use as a jumping off point for your website. For example, Woothemes creates a number of professional templates for the WordPress blogging script that work well for powering a variety of business websites.

Hiring It Out

Sometimes it’s more cost effective to hire out the design process if you don’t have anyone who has the appropriate skills to design a site. Sure, you could go through tutorials and programs and templates to figure out how to make a good product in the end, but it probably takes you many more hours that you could be using for other business tasks.

When you search for a web developer, look at their portfolio and see if the form and function match what you’re looking for. Get a price estimate before you put a lot of time and effort into the proposal process, as you don’t want to be paying out of your budget range for a website. Let the designer know the look you’re going for, the purpose of your site and check in with them on a regular basis so you stay on the same page.