We can not all be good in all areas of competencies, and one for which many people improvised themselves is web design or web creation.

Your uncle Mike will be happy to build an online website for you for sure! But think that many people use web design as a part time job just to bring some money at the end of the month. Simply browse ads on Kijiji to find many impostors in this field. You should never consider a non professionnal person to build a website for you.

The harmful factor in a bad web design is to represent your business or service as it should not. A failed presentation? A low quality site? A design without a long-term vision? Here’s how to ruin your hopes and also seek a place in the ranking of the worst site on the internet.

The same is also present when a person wants to create its own website. It is just as harmful to do it yourself than going through your uncle Mike’s solution. The desire to save a few hundred dollars will never compensate all the damage that will be done.

In fact, you should never create your own website at all. Beyond programming skills, it is a matter of perception, but more a unique artist view of the final design. If passion is not behind your project, nothing good will come out. The passion can not be felt unless your website has been done by a professional web designer.

If you dared visiting the website lingscars.com, ‘ll give you 10 seconds to regain sight and rinse your eyes. Whether by desire to create a « BUZZ » this website has a fair 0% credibility. Will it stops some to proceed with his service? Maybe no, but this is not the common individual would ask from a service provider, and this is why that kind of bling bling website will never be able to compete with a real website made by a web designer.

Reasons not to create its own website:

Lack of preparation

A good preparation and a detailed plan is required before building a website. You must set the goals of the site in terms of content, its target audience, media types, and so on. You have to do all the text content, revise, condense the pages, optimize the speed of the site, find the right hosting that will be adapted to the content. There are hundreds of factors to take into account and no beginners can think at every details.

Experience

Most likely, this will be your first web design. You will not have time to test your techniques and observe the deployment. Your site will be a « laboratory test » and therefore a high probability of missing the target.

Lost of precious time

The fact that you have no experience, will make the time to set up your website far exceed the money you think saving. Time to do the research, tryouts and your frustration will surely go up at one time or another!

Inability to verify the results

There are online tools to virtualize mobile devices, tablets and screens sizes. By cons, these tools are not all up to date nor really reflect the true user experience. The fact of not owning multiple devices (lack of budget) limits you to a pseudo appraisal of other devices on your website.

The ignorance of the SEO basics and tactics

SEO is actually the mechanism that drives the success of your website on the internet. The fact of not using sharped recognized techniques of programmation , will relegate your website to the lower rankings of Google search results.

Note: for example the « infinite scroll » page that are beautiful at first glance but if they are not well programmed prevents search engines from indexing it. This type of website uses javascript and this makes an arduous task to Google to index those. Now if you did not know that, then you do not know hundreds of other factors!

Online website creation tools

If there is worst tools online, hang me high and short! These tools that attract you by saying that there is no need of knowledge in programmation to build your website, it’s a scam! Yes, you should have something that will go online, but call this a website,… this is something else!

At most, you’ll be able to put text, pictures and videos but will be forced into their theme, or direction, or suffer limitations. You will be lucky if at the end, no advertisements is integrated with your website.

It is also likely that your web site will have security gaps. These tools rarely offer the required latest updates to web threats like exploits, virusses and malwares. Therefore doubt on the safety when using such free services.

The need to purchase a theme

For others, it will be to buy a theme to accelerate and improve their results. This is perhaps one of the best solutions, but it will require you to learn the theme, install it, configure it.

What works in the proposed demos and the results you’ll have on your website will be greatly different. Internet themes sellers knows that beautiful pictures are important to sell their themes. They sell parts of a dream.

When you have entered your own pictures and information, you can reach 50 or 60% of the expected look of the demo website. Why? Because those who created the demos on your theme, are real web professionals most of the time. The result are then stunning! Will you be able to recreate this? Hmmm….

Next, you will probably add extensions to your theme. They will require adjustments with your theme or server configuration or will be totally incompatible. Security risks are also very important in these solutions available to everyone! Your site will look like thousands of others, not unique as it should be!

Web hosting

You will need to find a web hosting for your website capable to drive the functions and its contents. The research time will be long and you will probably buy an all inclusive package which is itself below your needs or above!

If you do not know how to do it, you will have to pay a technician to set up your website, your database, activate your emails etc, or again having to learn how to do it.

Cross your fingers that they will be a good host and hope your site will be fast by their domain name servers (DNS).

Sell ??Online Products and Services

If your goal is to sell online some products or services, you will need to purchase and install a security certificate. You should know that it is usually complex to install this type of service.

Then you must ensure that you meet the PCI standards with your website, set it to proceed payments by credit cards and setup the payment gateway.

If you choose the shortcut and do business with Paypal, know that you might get into an real adventure and you should read our article: Accept online payments on your website.

Remember that you need to create your web policies, terms of use and privacy policy. This will require a lot of time and research.

Conclusion

If we calculate the time applied to search all the information, learn the techniques, costs involved in buying a theme and the hosting (with or without security certificate), you save nothing! At the bottom line, it’s not worthing it to build your own website unless you want to crash yourself  royally on dozens of key factors that will undermine your project.

Web creations from $ 199.95 to $ 1299.95 are very acceptable prices depending of website type and functions. Those professional web creations will give you credibility and web presence you deserve!

Think about it!