The cost of hiring a website designer is something that crops up regularly. Especially with all the television adverts showing you just how easy it is to build a website (even a complicated ecommerce shopping website) - if only you sign your life away with the company producing the commercial.
So why should you pay a website designer instead?
Can't you just use WordPress or the even easier Flash based services like Moonfruit?
Won't that work just as well?
Regardless of whether you're talking about a startup website or a bigger one, there are pros and cons to using a website designer versus a DIY build it yourself approach.
The free or cheap services out there are good for home sites such as your personal blog where you natter about what you've done recently and upload photos for friends and relatives to see. But, to be honest, if that's all you want to do then you'd get almost all the same benefit from a simple Facebook page.
But a business website is a representation of your business on the internet. Increasingly it's the first "shop front" that customers will encounter.
Which means that if the foot of the page says something like "free website provided by... ", your potential customers will immediately know that you don't much care about how your business is represented on the internet.
If you're a plumber or other word-of-mouth type business, that may work fine.
But for almost anyone else, this DIY approach is likely to backfire.
Unless you don't value your time, there will be a learning curve associated with your "free" website. The person showing you what to do on the 30 second advert practised for hours to make things look as easy as they claim. And if you've done ten or twenty similar sites already, it probably is that easy.
For instance, an experienced website designer can properly set up a WordPress website in under half an hour. That would include all the tweaking to sort out the stuff the default installation puts on the site, installing a variety of plugins to help stop spam, make contacting you easy, make the on-site SEO work like a dream and maybe even change the header on the default theme so that it matches your image.
Then they'll spend quite a bit more time making sure that all the content is added to the website and is properly optimised so that Google's robots will drool with enthusiasm when they crawl it.
You'll spend the first few hours trawling YouTube for some decent tutorial videos, struggle to follow some of them when they skip over a vital step or something's changed since the video was shot, and so on.
In the same way that you wouldn't tinker with a modern car yourself apart from adding fuel and checking things like the tyre pressures, the same goes for a creating modern website.
It's actually cheaper in the long run to pay a modest fee and get a properly installed website up and running. It will almost certainly be quicker as well - you've paid your website designer so they will do their job whereas if you're creating your own site there's a good chance that you'll leave it until tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.
So the simple answer to why hire a website designer rather than do it yourself is that you'll get a better job done, faster and less fraught than trying to do it yourself.
You can always specify that you want to do any updates to the site yourself, such as adding new blog posts on a regular basis. That's different because the basic framework will already be there, ready for you to use.
But the initial site creation is best left to an expert so that it's done to specification, on time and on budget.
Deep down, you know that makes sense!
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