Do It Yourself Website Builders

Do it yourself website building sites are an easy trap to fall into. They are simple, quick, and at face value, they are the cheaper option. Many small businesses are in the mind frame that they don’t need anything fancy as far as a website is concerned, so why spend the money hiring a professional? Even though the DIY website builders seem like the best route, there are a multitude of underlying issues that may end up costing a business more time and money than if they had just started out with a professional design company.

When using a DIY website builder, you are given some very basic options of what you can do to “build” a site. Basically, all you are doing is pasting your information into the pre-designed slots on a template. This doesn’t sound so bad, right? This actually presents one of the main issues with DIY sites, this template is one of few that is offered to millions of customers who join that same website building site. So while the website has your company information on it, it may look just like thousands, if not more, of other sites out there. The way these sites are designed also creates an issue with search engine optimization and ranking. When Google crawls your website, they are not seeing it as containing content and your site does not get indexed, and, in turn, does not show up as a search result.  Specifically, many of these DIY builders actually host your valuable content on their own domain, meaning THEY are getting the SEO benefit, not you!

Many of these sites will give you an option for a free or very cheap website domain. Now we’ve all learned throughout our lives that we get what we pay for. Your website may end up with ads plastered all over it and you will most likely have a domain name that is some sort of subdomain of the website builder. These DIY website builders are not out there just supplying some free service for the goodness of mankind; they need to make money, which means either charging you for a premium website or monopolizing every possible way to put their name on your page.

Some other issues that customers of DIY website building sites encounter include their website was not mobile friendly (a huge issue seeing as how Google just confirmed that more searches take place on cell phones than desktops), a lack of support staff to handle issues that arise, limitations on what can be added to website to beef up content, and inability to take your domain name with you if you choose to use a different company. Not to mention, with DIY website builders, you are basically renting space, which leaves you at their mercy. If for some reason they want to take your site down, most of them can. Plus, you run the risk of losing ownership of the content on your page.

While there are people out there who can successfully use these sites to develop their own website that meets their needs, there are quite a few risks that come with taking the DIY website building route. Looking for someone you can trust to streamline the website building process for you? Call i3 today and let us help.