100 Hours and a Headache Later – The Case Against DIY

You’ve seen the ads. They’re running during primetime ad slots and youtube videos alike. A vaguely familiar celebrity appears: “Today, I’m going to show you how I built my own website using the super awesome tools provided by _____!”

All of the Do-It-Yourself websites primarily rely on a few selling points:

“Choose from our Beautiful Website Templates”
“Build a Unique Website with Drag ‘N Drop Editing”
“All-In-Solutions to Get Your Business Online”

Well, there are a few problems with using sites like Weebly, Squarespace, or Wix to build a website (Yes, I’m confident enough you’ll stay away from them enough to call them by their names).

To best illustrate these problems, I’m going to address the above claims one by one.

1) “Choose from our Beautiful Website Templates”

Those templates on a lot of those sites are pretty nice looking, I’ll give them that. But I’d stay away, because:

• It’s not really yours. You’re fitting your message into someone other business’s templated design, when the design should be tailored to fit your unique business.
• You’re put in a box. “Oops, sorry, this template doesn’t have a way to post events. Guess you’ll have to change everything to use this other template, that does allow events.”
• Where’re the nice photos? You’ll notice that a lot of default templates heavily rely on quality photography or video. Those things don’t just happen, they’re made by a professional. Often times, rather, a team of professionals.

2) “Build a Unique Website with Drag ‘N Drop Editing”

Alright, so you can avoid the pitfalls of using pre-made templates by building it out yourself, right? Wrong:

• There’s a learning curve. Drag ‘N Drop editing sounds stupidly simple, right? But you still have to learn the ins-and-outs of the system. It’s going to take a lot of time to learn them all, and even more to build everything.
• What’s even possible? When you use drag ‘n drop, you’re thinking “inside the box.” You don’t know what is and isn’t possible, and you’re shut out to possibilities beyond your current scope of knowledge.
• Support is sketchy. Have a question? Congratulations, so do 1000 other small business owners struggling with the same problem. Please hold.

3) “All-In-Solutions to Get Your Business Online”

All in one! How can anything possibly go wrong with using an all-in-one solution? Well…

• They’re offering peanuts. The tertiary elements offered around making a website aren’t really that complicated – buying a domain name, for example, is extremely easy to do yourself.
• It’s not truly all-in-one. There’s a lot of stuff that’s simply left out. What does your website do to reach the top of Google? What happens if the site goes down? How about licensing?
• You have to Do It Yourself! This is a do-it-yourself solution. That means that, while they may supply the tools, you have to do all the work yourself. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to unclog your own sink, but if you have, you probably recognize that certain times that the work is best left to the experts. Working to provide your audience with a valuable, memorable web experience is one of those times.

Shameless plug: We’d love to talk to you about what you’re looking to do online. Get in touch with us, we can walk you through our process and start discussing how to make your goals a reality.