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TL;DR
- 98 percent of those that attempt the DIY route never successfully publish a website.
- Drag and drop style design isn’t always feasible.While that may sound simple on the surface, only the most basic design elements work well with such a tool.
- DIY website services maintain their overall quality by limiting the kinds of customization that their customers can make.
- On DIY websites, the pages you create for your business are only yours in name. If you transfer websites, that content may not be able to transfer.
- Having pages built to suit means that they will remain useful and upgradeable for years into the future, and there’s no question who retains ownership of them.
The Death of DIY Websites
If you’re an avid reader of our web design blog (and we hope you are), you’ve probably noticed that we cover a wide range of topics like web hosting, design best practices and digital marketing. We do that for one very important reason. It’s because your business website is critical to the success of your company – and we want to help you get it right.
That’s also why we try to give you as much information as we can in a format that’s useful and easy to understand. The fact is that excellent web design can be difficult for those approaching it for the first time. There’s an awful lot to consider when attempting to build a great website for your business, and the costs of failure can be steep.
Those factors have led to a proliferation of DIY website services promising to simplify the process for business owners, but they are not a cure-all. As business owners struggle to get what they need from these DIY tools, some are learning that they’re better off looking to trusted professionals for help. Here are some of the factors contributing to the death of DIY websites.
Time is a Challenge
The first factor that is contributing to the death of DIY websites is a challenge that business owners everywhere are intimately familiar with – time. Even with the simplest of DIY website tools, building a successful business website isn’t a quick process. It takes time to decide on things like color schemes, layouts and multimedia elements, and that’s just the visuals.
It’s also necessary to think about how the site should be optimized to meet specific business needs and figure out what metrics will be used to measure its performance. All of that adds up to a significant time investment, which is a luxury that many business owners can’t afford. That goes a long way toward explaining why 98 percent of those that attempt the DIY route never successfully publish a website.
Moving Beyond the Basics
Most of the available DIY website services offer some variation of a drag-and-drop interface as the backbone of their design tools. While that may sound simple on the surface, only the most basic design elements work well with such a tool. That means that any business seeking to build a website that goes beyond a simple digital brochure is bound to start encountering difficulties.
The largest problems are usually because the advanced features offered by many DIY website services are anything but easy to use. Integrating things like mobile-friendly optimizations, SEO tools and eCommerce functionality takes a good deal of knowledge that the average business owner typically doesn’t have. Since many of these features are must-haves on modern business websites, it’s not an option to forego them.
Growing Pains
Successful businesses are always on the move. They grow and change on a constant basis, and that means that their websites must do the same. It doesn’t take long to outgrow the average DIY website, and once it happens, it’s time to either start over from scratch or make sacrifices in either quality or functionality. Those are not choices that any business owner looks forward to making.
The reason this happens is that DIY website services maintain their overall quality by limiting the kinds of customizations that their customers can make. Professional website designers might instead opt for a design built around a CMS like WordPress, which offers flexible and extensible frameworks that are easy to customize and grow with. They’re such a popular option that they’ve been downloaded for use a total of 218 million times.
Retaining Control
The final, and perhaps most important factor that is leading to the death of DIY websites is the issue of site ownership. You see, with many DIY website building services, the pages that you create for your business belong to you in name only. That means if you ever have the need to move to a different service or web host, you may not be able to transfer the content of your website at will.
This is often explained by the site’s reliance on proprietary code that is used in the design process, and the need for the company to protect their technology. While that’s understandable, it can become quite inconvenient for business owners that value agility and the ability to exercise control over their company’s marketing assets.
Skipping the Headache
As you can see, there are some pretty big drawbacks to the DIY website option. That isn’t to say they have no value. There are plenty of businesses that make use of them when starting out. The trouble is that they sometimes don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into until they encounter one of the above mentioned issues. The reality is that for most growing businesses, there’s no substitute for a professionally designed website.
Having pages built to suit means that they will remain useful and upgradeable for years into the future, and there’s no question who retains ownership of them. If your business is considering going the DIY route, make sure that you do your homework so you’ll be able to make an informed decision you won’t come to regret.
Don’t want to be bothered with a DIY website? Contact us today and we’ll get to work building your business a website you’ll love!
