We are a Miami Web Design Company specializing in helping small and mid-size businesses reach their full potential in the online world.
If you are planning to build a website, or choose to have one built for you, there are many factors that you will need to address, so that you may make an informed decision on what your next step should be.
In the modern age, websites need to combine three core elements into their designs. Some web designers are experts at one or two of these three elements, but finding a developer that excels in all three can be a tricky business.
Nowadays, it is not sufficient for a website to look gorgeous. A lot more thought and effort has to go under the hood to ensure that the websites performs according to the foundations laid by search engines.
There three core elements are:
- Ease of use,
- Attractiveness of design and
- Search engine optimization
A Fourth element could be added to that list, one which is of equal importance, and the reason why is isn’t on that list is simply because this element is beyond the purview of the designer: Content (articles)
With the above in mind, and if you are still reading this article, as a business owner in need of a new website, you will need contemplate two possibilities:
- Do you take a chance and build your own website?
- Do you have it designed by a professional.
Here, I’ll address both issues, in terms of feasibility, long term efficacity, performance and cost.
Building the website yourself
I have been a web developer for over 20 years. In that time, I have come across a number of people, met in social gatherings, who, during the course of an evening amongst friends for example, often times talked about their needs for a website. They would say something like:
“I need a website for my business, but I really don’t want to pay a fortune for it.”
The answer to that question, inevitably lead to a variety of suggestions, the most common being:
- “Building a website is so easy. You should do it yourself”.
- “I have a nephew who’s studying computer in college. He could do this for you easily”
- “Why don’t you do it through WIX. Easy to design plus it’s free.
I usually stay away from mixing business with pleasure, and as a result I rarely express an opinion on this subject, unless specifically asked to do so.
But as a professional web designer, here are my views on the subject:
Building your own website is not as easy as you think. The internet industry relies on technologies that are forever evolving, and professional web developers have to keep up to date with this changes on a constant basis.
For a professional website designer, the learning curve is unending. There is always something new to learn, methodologies to understand, trends to evaluate…
Our industry is such that programming languages which might have been an absolute necessity to know in the past may end up becoming obsolete and in some cases, even incompatible with modern browsers.
And even when programing languages stand the tests of time, they still undergo regular re-births, just to keep abreast of security breaches caused by hacking. Or to adapt themselves to changes made in hardware.
So if you want to design you own website, be prepared to start getting to your books because you’re going to need all the knowledge you can muster.
This learning process, ongoing as it may be for professionals may take you several months to even years before you get to a level where you begin to have an understanding on how website design really works.
At this stage, you may ask yourself whether you should look into signing up with companies such as WIX where, you are told, “designing your own website” is easy. And free.
As the owner of an Affordable Website Design in Miami, you would be amazed by the sheer number of customers who call me to move their site away from WIX or other such platforms and into their own website.
The reason for this is that, the ease of design proclaimed as the essence of their marketing messages has severe restrictions, and requires a learning curve.
More importantly, these customers soon discover that what they though would be free, is in fact quite expensive.
In addition to acquiring enough knowledge to be able to design your own website, your next step will be to tackle the elephant in the room:
Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is a field that is even more changing than the web design industry! Google and other search engines are continuously fine tuning their algorithms making methodologies of yesterday become redundant a week later.
They do so in a constant effort to be better at what they do, offer more relevant results for searches, ensuring that people who search for anything are offered the right choices. Changes are also made to combat efforts by marketers to try and subvert the search engine results by abusing certain parameters.
All in all, it takes a lot of effort to design, create and publish a website that stand a chance of achieving success online and while the idea of doing it yourself may sound appealing at first, if you are serious about it, then my advice would be to look for a competent and reputable WordPress Web Design Agency in Miami.