A website is an assortment of related web pages. Nowadays, business owners, entrepreneurs, bloggers, and article writers mostly have a website. It’s a necessary tool today to potentially tap prospective clients and connect with a broader range of people for your business.

You can start a website in many ways, depending on several factors such as budget and design aesthetics. Regardless of your reasons, you can choose to hire a professional developer, or you can tackle it on your own.

If you’re decided on doing it solo, some advantages and disadvantages come with it. This article will discuss things you need to know.

Things To Consider

Launching a website is not an easy task. It’s one of the most challenging objectives to accomplish due to the big and small details that accompany it. So, before starting a website from scratch, you need to consider your options and do thorough planning. What type of website should you consider? What’s your domain name? Do you have an established platform? Do you have a hosting provider?

These are only some of the queries you need to ponder on and answer. The good news is, the Internet has unlimited learning touchpoints for that subject. You can find more information relating to setting-up a professionally-looking website from a myriad of online resources.

Your Options

With the support of modern technology, there are several ways to create a website for your growing business. Here are several of the most popular selections:

1. Program the website yourself

This option is the most economical amongst all the available options. In some cases, it’s even free! You can also work at your own pace. All you need to have to be successful in this avenue are the necessary skill sets and an insurmountable amount of patience to build the entire website.

2. Developing the website using a website builder

The website builder is the easiest option. It’s perfect for beginners because everything necessary in website creation is integrated into the package. The package will typically include design templates, website editors, domain name, web hosting, email address, and customer support. It takes care of the complex tasks for you.

3. Website creation using Content Management System (CMS)

Content Management Systems are far more complicated, even though they have contrasting similarities with website builders. They are more limited compared with website building software. Still, they tend to have thousands of web plugins to choose from generally.

All these methods have their unique advantages and disadvantages. This article will primarily focus on building your own website.

Pros

Building a website on your own can give you several benefits compared with hiring someone to do it for you. Here are a few:

1. Potentially Save You Cash

Professional websites aren’t cheap. The hefty price tag that comes with sourcing someone to build a website for you becomes a significant consideration in the building process. If you’re keen on saving cash, then doing it alone or with minimal help should be your objective.

Arguably, from early conceptualization to its eventual launch, building your website can theoretically save you plenty of cash along the way. Not only that, but you can also reallocate the savings you made to other essential parts of the business process. Moreover, your work will be considerably more straightforward and cost-efficient if you’re highly equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to accomplish this tremendous task.

The amount you can save will be in the thousands if not hundreds of dollars by going this route. Just don’t forget to ask for professional advice from other people who are knowledgeable about the craft. They should be able to point out existing flaws that might otherwise evade your attention.

2. Provide Learning Experiences

Besides saving much-needed cash, another advantage of exclusively building your website is the number of learning experiences you can acquire. This work will cost plenty of dedication and time—most of which you must spend in research and self-education.

A good starting point is mastering a few primary website-building languages such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), JavaScript, and Flash. These languages can be complicated for the beginner. That’s why research is necessary because it’ll help in pointing out the best practices, persisting issues, and complex problems until you arrive at the endpoint.

There are plenty of things you can do that are beneficial to you. You can attend learning courses, read books relevant to the topic, browse websites for inspiration, and talk to a friend or two for advice. All these things will give you much-needed knowledge to succeed in this endeavor.

3. Decision Flexibility

Wouldn’t you agree that it’s satisfying to become your boss? Working alone in building your website does exactly that. It provides a sense of sovereignty for every decision you must make in the project.

This outcome is achievable when you’ve finally honed the necessary skills to build a website. When you have those skills, you can design everything according to your preference as much as you want, whenever you want. 

Aside from having sole decisions on the matter, it’s also cost-effective to implement these decisions. You’ll always have access to the website, and you won’t pay a developer should changes need to be made on the site. As a bonus, everything can transpire at your own pace.

Cons

There are plenty of pros to constructing your website. However, on the contrary, there are also many reasons it’s inadvisable. Here are some of them.

1. It Won’t Work As Intended

Errors and malfunctions are commonly-reoccurring problems that you may encounter when you don’t have the level of expertise required to accomplish the goal.  

Technical issues such as bugs often arise in the coding world. They’re such a nuisance because they cause malfunctions and disorganization on your site. Furthermore, these system flaws are hard to find using an untrained eye. Only those who are skilled enough to identify these bugs can help address them.

Like with most professionals, there’s a level of experience that you need to have to perfect your craft. You won’t learn these skills overnight. It takes time and continuous practice.

In such cases when you can no longer find a solution to the problem, then that would be the time to call professionals to fix the problem for you. They have the network and necessary skills to get the job done. Yes, you must pay a certain amount for their services. Still, it’s worth the price to ensure the functionality of your website.

2. Time-Consuming

Building a fully functional, standard-compliant website is not an easy task, especially for someone who lacks the necessary skills. Therefore, you’re obligated to invest plenty of time in training and acquiring knowledge about the subject. Not only that, but you’re also obliged to monitor your website activity once it’s operational.

With that setup in mind, plenty of businesses would instead allocate a portion of their funding to hiring a developer to create and maintain their website. They’d instead want to focus on more important issues rather than handle this issue firsthand because the learning curve of this option is steep. This question will be asked to you as well. Would you continue spending your time on the path of learning, or would you rather spend it on managing your business instead?

3. It May Look Unprofessional

An unprofessional-looking landing page is the least of the criticisms you’d want to get about your website. Understandably, you envision a clean-looking, functional website for your visitors to enjoy. However, sometimes, the result dramatically differs from what was anticipated.

Due to a deficiency of knowledge and experience, the resulting website might look disorganized, inconsistent, and incoherent. Contents are misaligned, and it’s all a mess. This scenario often happens in do-it-yourself projects such as website building. You don’t want this to occur to your project as well.

Fortunately for you, an alternative route is to hire professional website developers to do it. They possess the technical skills to polish the website according to your desired requirements. Again, you must pay a hefty price for their services. However, studies have shown that audiences want to engage in a clean, professional-looking website that’s attractive and functional. So, hiring a competent individual is an option worth considering.

Conclusion

Setting up your website is one of the critical steps in becoming profitable in your online business today. As highlighted above, it comes with its pros and cons. Building it by yourself can be a very demanding task. But, if you’re equipped with the right skill sets to accomplish the job, then you’ll do just fine.

However, on the flip side, creating a website by yourself also presents some risks. Software flaws may arise, and building and refining the site takes a hefty amount of time.

The choice of whether to do it on your own or let a professional do it for you rests in your hands. Whatever you decide upon, make sure that it’s in accordance with your goals and objectives.