Currently it is becoming more and more popular to use DIY website builders such as Squarespace, WIX, Spark etc. This makes perfect sense if you listen to the marketing campaigns that they put out. There is no need to learn any kind of code. All you need to do is pay a small monthly fee and you get to make your own website with all the ease of making toast. It sounds great, but it’s a trap!
In this post you will be warned of all the negative aspects that are part and parcel of the DIY website building racket.
When a professional website builder makes you a website and you pay large dollars for it, you own everything. This includes all the content, images, data, and plugins. When it comes down to managing the site, you have greater control and flexibility because of this.
If you have instead made a website using a DIY builder, and you want to control it, you can’t. You will have built something that you can’t do anything further to. Want to move it anywhere? You will have to rebuild it completely.
If you are a business man, you want people to get a certain air of who you are simply by seeing what you are wearing. This is why you wear a suit. You look professional in it. You do this because you want to give off an impression that will influence people’s behaviour in a fashion that is favourable to you. The same principal can be applied to website building.
A professionally built website will look like just that: professionally built. If you want your website to look like it was made on the cheap and at home, by all means do so. You may be giving your clients an impression that is at odds with the impression you want them to get.
It might seem like a god-send to be able to make websites without having to know any code. However, with no professional website builder to make sure the code is good and tight, you run the risk of having sub-standard code all over your website.
Why is this a huge problem? Because bad code hurts a website’s search placement. And a website with weak coding will most likely rank extremely poorly on google. This is a great way to lose out on business, making the cheap option for making websites look much more expensive when you really look at it.
The DIY building route will lock you into using the servers that belong to the company that you used to build the website with. If you choose to do it for free, do you want the name of the company in your website address? It might be free, but it will look unprofessional. Even if you do pay, the ultimate result is no control over your website.
