“Use our website builder and build your own website!” Sound familiar? We’ve all seen these repetitive advertisements from businesses such as Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Godaddy and so on. The messaging of these companies is consistent as they are based on the same premise of “you can do it yourself.”
What are the supposed benefits of building your own website?
- It will take half the time
- It’s much cheaper
- I can do a better job with a template
Those are great benefits, but do they really hold up to snuff? As website builders, we may be biased, but we want to show you how these supposed benefits are actually mythical. Here, we’ll reveal these myths, and convince you why you should rely on professionals to get the most out of your website.
MYTH ONE: It will take half the time
You’re starting your business and you need a website right away. We couldn’t agree more and are glad that you’re making a digital footprint. So while you can mash something together in a few hours on a builder, if you intend to be in business for a long time why rush one of the most important assets to your business success?
Building the right website can take a lot of time for businesses because they go through a process to make sure it’s perfect.
What makes a perfect website?
- On-brand design that clearly displays your company mission, vision and tells your story to new and current customers. This includes proper and consistent colours, high-quality iconography and imagery, font selection, and graphic resources such as your logo that are technically correct (using SVG or webp for scaling, responsiveness, and resolution)
- Design that is intuitive, mobile-friendly, professional, and easy on the eyes
- Content that properly informs consumers
- SEO (search engine optimization) to make sure your business can be easily found on Google
Your website is the online home of your business. It offers credibility to your products and services and informs consumers on their shopping journey. According to BIZReport, 70-80% of people will research a company online before deciding to buy a product or services, mostly from the company’s website.
MYTH TWO: It’s much cheaper to build my own website
Here’s the truth of the matter: no matter what avenue you take in building a website, there are many costs involved – not only in building it but also maintaining it.
Some of these costs include:
- Web Hosting
- Domain
- SSL certificate
- Backup & Security
- Maintenance Costs
- Photography
- Videos
All this can add up. Squarespace costs $18/month or $216/year for all of these services. While having a business (such as Unbuttoned Media) build your website can cost thousands of dollars, there is an opportunity cost that should be considered. Every hour you spend building your own website, that’s an hour you could have spent elsewhere on your business. If you haven’t built a website before you may end up investing many more hours than you expected and end up with a far inferior product. As small business owners ourselves, we understand limiting costs and finding efficiencies, but we also understand the value of our time – and we hope you do too.
MYTH THREE: I can do a better job with a template
Templates are generally very well designed, but there are a lot of problems with cookie-cutter websites. Templates were built to look perfect, however, your content and brand identity were not considered in the design process. Once you start to plug your own content in, you may find redundancies, improper formatting, and overall imagery and colours that don’t fit your business. A beautiful template can be a great source of inspiration, but rarely can a template tell your business story uniquely and properly as well as a dedicated website-building company.
I’m still not convinced
At the end of the day, it’s your business. You know it better than anyone else: the vision, mission, budgeting, operations, value proposition, etc. At Unbuttoned Media, we don’t claim to know your business better than you and we never will. We will never pretend to know how to do your service or make your product. You’re the expert! But our business is digital marketing, our business is websites. The return on investment is there for a curated website-building experience – don’t ignore it.
To get a website made for your business click here.
