If you’re a small business owner, blogger, or someone who’s just curious about having a website but doesn’t necessarily need one, you may have thought—“should I build my own website, or Hire a web designer?” This is a great question to ask, and one that we’ll go over in depth in this blog post. We’ll also look at some of the main considerations for buying vs. building your own site, and some of the pros and cons of each option.
What’s Your Skill Level with Web Design and Development? Are You a Technical Person?
This is one of the first considerations when you’re looking at building your own website or hiring someone else to do it. Simply because, if you’re not a Technical person or you don’t know anything about building websites, it’s going to be quite a bit more difficult for you to get something done, compared to someone who already knows what they’re doing and can rattle off some HTML code or code CSS with ease.
There are, however, a lot of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG), drag-and-drop website builders such as Squarespace and Shopify (for eCommerce), as well as Wix and others that can allow people with little to no experience building websites to create a great-looking site from nothing. They even offer options for people to host these websites, register custom domains, and more. They’re often referred to as “website builders,” and they’re really great for people who might be lacking technical experience or expertise.
Overall Budget: How Much Money Do You Have to Spend on Web Design?
This is a big one for most people. If you don’t have much (or any) money to spend paying someone to build you a website, you will probably have to look at doing at least some of the work yourself. Like many other professional services, web design work is expensive because it’s something that requires specific knowledge, and that knowledge is valuable.
There are some workarounds though for expensive web design, such as having a web design student do it, or a friend or family member who knows a bit about web design, or who at least knows enough to use a site builder to get something done for you.
How Much Time Do You Have to Build a Site?
Another big consideration as to whether or not you should build your own website or have someone else build one for you is how much time you have to spend on the project. Building a website can be extremely time consuming because there are so many things that need to come together in order to have a great website. Content, design, images—these are all things that need to be created or purchased and then put together in a way that looks good and functions properly. Content management systems like WordPress make this easier, but it still takes time.
If you don’t have any experience building a website, it’s going to take a considerable amount of time to learn. Even if you do have experience, it’s still going to take quite a bit of time for you to be able to put everything together. So either way you look at it, unless you’re hiring someone to do it for you, it’s going to take up a lot of your time.
What’s the Goal of Your Website? How Polished Does It Need to Be?
The goal of your website is very important in the process of deciding whether to build your own website or hire someone else to do it for you. For example, if the goal is to build an eCommerce website that processes payments securely and you have zero web design experience, then it’s probably not something that you’re going to be able to do on your own. However, if the goal of your website is to be a simple personal blog, this will be much easier to accomplish.
The more polished and high-functioning your website needs to be, the more experience you need to have. In contrast, the simpler your website needs to be, the more likely that you’ll be able to build it on your own.
When making any decision about building your own site vs. paying someone else to do it for you, it’s a good idea to do a lot of research and make sure you’re aware of all the various options out there, which can really help you make an informed decision and end up with a website they you can feel good about showcasing to the world.
