We all have talents that go beyond our main focus in business. A doctor can be a talented woodworker, an auto mechanic may have excellent plumbing skills and so on. With these talents, Do-It-Yourself (DYI) makes perfect sense and can even save you some expensive service calls. However, an excellent woodworker may not be the best choice for removing tonsils. Similarly, a professional web designer may be the better choice for creating your company's web site.
For the brave, there are many programs and design bots out there will allow even the least talented person to produce web sites that will, more or less, exactly fail to meet expectations. Sites that are poorly designed and constructed lack sincerity and project an amateurish image to your visitors. Like everything else that represents your business, your web site needs to inspire confidence.
Consider the time it will take you to learn how to use the design bot that your host provides. This is time spent not running your business. Add to this the time required to maintain and troubleshoot your site and you will begin to see a large, unfriendly number. And there is the intangible, cost to your business for having a site that is the internet equivalent of drawing your business cards with a crayon. |
After having invested considerable time and energy, you'll have a site that you're largely unhappy with and unable to make even the simplest change to without committing to endless hours of frustration.
If your design bot is not W3C Compliant, search engines will be blissfully unaware of your site's existence despite how many times you submit it. Your business will pay the price in lost visitors and potential customers.
Then there is cost of Doing-It-Over (DIO), which nearly everyone who creates a DYI site will be faced with. The reason for this is that when robots create your site, they use coding conventions which are practically impossible for human designers to work with. When you need a feature that your design bot can't produce, a human designer will have to recreate part or all of your site in order to do the work.
So where do you turn when you have a do it yourself budget but don't want a web site that looks like you did it yourself? You need a web designer. And not just anyone that hands you a business card (there are design bots for those, too). Insist on Unique Web Services for the best results!
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