The process of getting a website built for your business or even building a personal website can get quite complex and expensive, especially if you go down the usual route of seeking a website designer on the Internet or business directories.
In most cases you will find that you need to do spend a lot of you time, planning, emailing, chatting or phoning before you can get a satisfactory design implemented not to talk of the substantial expenses you will incur – in short the whole process can prove an expensive distraction from building or running your business website builder.
When you consider your business operating costs, it makes sense to invest as little money as possible on building your website if you can still obtain an adequate level of quality and utility from it.
Fortunately, you can build a professional looking website yourself without employing a website developer to construct it and save yourself a substantial amount of money.
There are at various ways to go about this using either a software website builder or online website maker services and apart from the money savings they offer several other advantages over hiring a web site designer.
Cost: The cost factor is one of the most important reasons you should consider building your website yourself. Employing a website designer to build a web site can turn out quite expensive especially if you don’t have a good idea what your needs are or if you add features or change things along the way. While a website builder may cost you anything from $5 a month for a simple website builder to $30/month for a full-fledged e-commerce system, a Website designer will charge you at least $300-2000 to create a website excluding the cost of hosting and any upgrades or updates you think of later.
Website Creation Timeframe: The process of having a custom web site portal created for you by a web site builder can be a lengthy, involved and time-consuming one, taking weeks or even months for a large, full featured site with a specially created design as your selected website designer has to interpret your requirements, implement your required feature set and envision a suitable design. Using a website building system to create your website tends to be a much quicker proposition since all you need to do is select a pre-built design and modify or customise it as much as the software or system allows you to.
Simplicity and Safety: While you may think that your lack of web creation skills would make it impossible for you to design a web site, website builder software systems usually incorporate wizards that help you build your site without you needing to learn any code at all, you just click a button or drag and drop features into place. With a website builder you can actually have your website up and running in less than 30 minutes. While you may fear to build your own website because you think you may mess up the process and end up with a terrible looking website, web site builders usually separate the content you put in from the code beneath it so that there is no way you can damage the look of your site. In short, you have nothing to fear and nothing to lose.
Comprehensive Feature List: Because the entire feature set that comes with a package is available to you from the start, with a website builder you can add extra features without paying extra costs or having to wait for a quote or experience a delay while the job is completed. On the other hand any extra features you decide to add onto a custom-built website will certainly require you to pay your developer more money and take far longer to implement. So all you need to get started are your documents and media – photos, video, sound etc.
Free Integrated Site Hosting: When building a website the conventional way, you need to subscribe to a web site hosting service and then have it set up before you can get started. This gives you more complexity and another thing to remember to manage. Many website builders, especially online services have website hosting included in their setup and ready to use at no extra cost.
Accessibility: Using website creation software enables you to access and use whatever facilities are available at any time you like. Another benefit is that you can log in and use it to modify your website from any location in the world once you have Internet access available to you.
Feature Compatibility/Availability: Website creation software and online website builder systems are usually packaged with optional features that you can easily add to your website – usually with a simple button click. As these tools such as blogs, polls or forms are integrated into the system they generally work perfectly well without the incompatibilities you can get when you mix and match various scripts from various sources as web designers tend to do.
When you build a customised website, you need to pay for any new features so as new technologies such as the use of video, e-commerce or social networking facilities such as Facebook or Twitter emerge and are used increasingly on the web, you may need to pay extra to have them integrated into your custom-built website. Conversely, these are often integrated as free upgrades when you build a website with a website creating system.
Bearing all these factors in mind, you can see that using website builders makes it is fairly easy to create a professional looking website without spending lots of money upfront, while adding the ability to upgrade and manage your site whenever you want.