Do It Yourself Website?
Pro’s and Con’s

If you want an efficient, relatively inexpensive approach to reaching customers, clients or members, establishing a website can certainly help you achieve that.

Some Things to Consider

Once you have made a decision to give your business a website presence or improve your existing website if you already have one, there are a few things to consider:

1. What do I want to accomplish with my site? This will determine how complex your site or changes will be.

2. How much time can I or am I willing to devote?

3. How much can I or am I willing to spend to accomplish my site goals?

Once you address these items you can decide whether to Do It Yourself or hire someone to develop your website.

What Type of Website Do I Need?

A website provides constant access to your business whether it’s local or global. And, depending on your goals and needs, you can create any of the following:

a) Simple online information website such as a Blog,

b) Basic website requiring a domain name, website development software and a hosting company,

c) Robust ecommerce store which is the basic website plus ads-ons such as a shopping cart and merchant account that are required to sell products online.

Budget Considerations

After you have determined what you want to accomplish with your site and reviewed the differences between a blog, basic website and an ecommerce site, you are ready to decide if you are going to learn how to Do It Yourself or Hire a Website Developer.

It should be kept in mind that in addition to developing the initial pages for your website, it is necessary to make changes to your site (website management) as your business changes, whether it is information about your company, or a change in product offerings or prices. And, you will either have to learn how to make the changes yourself or have a developer make the changes as needed.

If you decide you have the time and are willing to put in the required effort to learn the technology involved, including at least the basics of HTML, website computer language, you can save a lot of money in creating your own website. If you do it yourself, you can also save the on-going costs of updating your site for changes when required instead of using a developer.

If you hire a developer to set up a basic website it could cost between $500 and $2500. It will also be necessary to budget additional on-going costs for updating and maintaining your site. The costs of a robust ecommerce site with a shopping cart and merchant account will usually cost significantly more.

An Alternative Approach

An good alternative to doing it yourself or hiring a website developer that can still save you hundreds or thousands of dollars is to buy an interactive online website developer. That is, an online service that will guide you through all of the necessary steps (domain name, design and hosting) for setting up a site and maintaining it for changes in your business products, prices or other content. While there are a number of companies who claim they can effectively do this, you need to be careful since they are not all created equal.

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