People use the Internet every day to find things that they need. Having a well laid out website can be provided in all sorts of useful information to those who might need what you have to offer. Such as hours of business, email address and information as to why they should pick your company over the others.
When designing and planning a business website, you generally have two options. Building the website yourself or contact a web designer or programmer. Before rushing into a lengthy do it yourself project or you put out a lot of money to have a professional designer do it. Consider the pros and cons of both approaches to building a company website!
Design Abilities – There are many desktop and online applications that exist that enable you to create websites quickly. Desktop programs like Dreamweaver, Coda, Net Objects Fusion and others ship with templates you can use to create a wonderful website with minimal HTML or Web programming experience.
Many of these easy to use sites or templates produce only basic sites that are more suitable for personal websites. While you’re about to produce an attractive and functional site with the consumer-oriented tools, you must possess at least some type of experience in coding and programming. So you can add advanced features such as customer management solutions, working shopping cart application, login or even a membership management. If you need these types of features for your website and don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, you might want to hire a professional web developer.
Set Up And Implement Your Site – If you know that your business is going to need only a minimal web presence and site that consists of just a couple pages, you can probably use the available web design tools to create your website in just a few hours. If you’re planning to sell products online or have a customer management system, designing and implementing a site can be very time consuming. Selling products online you will want to ensure that every product has a description and you make sure to include everything for that product. Means you must design a new page or database entry for every product your planning to sell.
If your planning to offer helpful content on the site you should attract more visitors, by writing and uploading articles for your site this can take up substantial amount of time in your daily schedule. If creating product pages or content for the pages if this distracts you form running your business and growing, you should seriously consider outsourcing your project.
Repairs And Maintenance – A successful website requires more than just a name and great design. Once you make your website LIVE, it will require continuous maintenance and updating to ensure potential customers that will keep coming back. It’s easy to create a website with modern development software tools, these applications are not very useful if your site starts to have many problems. HTML and code errors, broken links, or corrupted database files are always a main concern for busy websites. Unless you have someone in the business that has the ability to do a quick troubleshoot and resolve the issues that might arise with your website, if your using a professional to design, monitor and maintain this site, it can be saved.
Money – All in all, money will undoubtedly be the major consideration in your decision to outsource your companies website or you do the work at home. A good professional website developers usually don’t work cheap, nor do they ever. Spending some time soliciting ideas and bids from developers, you can find someone who can work within your budget area. If you’re creating the site yourself you will save a lot of money. However, before taking this task upon yourself or appoint the tasks to one of your employees, you should determine if the time you spend on this project could better be used to maintain your business.
For more information about creating a website yourself vs. a web design company, contact Windy City Strategies. They will be more than welcome to help you figure out what is best for you, your business and your pocket.