Web Site Design – DIY or Outsource?

Create your own web site or hire a web designer?

There are several questions you need to ask yourself before deciding to build and edit your own sites or seek a professional web designer:

* How often will you update or make changes to your site?
* How many web sites will you be building?
* How complex (how many pages) will your website(s) be?
* Will your site be static or dynamic?

As a general rule, if you have more time and less money, you learn to do it yourself; if you have more money and less time you can contract it out.

FREQUENT WEB SITE EDITING If you are going to make frequent changes to your web site such as add new content, new articles, new products, etc, it pays to create, or at least edit, your web site yourself. You don’t want to have to run to your webmaster and pay $25 every time you change some content or want to test a new design or color scheme.

Many people will tell you that you don’t have to know the underlying html tags to edit web sites. Perhaps, but it’s LOTS easier if you know basic html. It’s not a complex “programming language” or anything, it’s just tags that tell the browser what to do. Once you have a basic understanding, the rest will come along in a “learn as you go” manner. Just go to Google and type in “learn HTML”.

You’ll also learn basic layout and formatting using tables and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Again, if you start with a few simple sites you can learn as you go.

NUMBER OF WEB SITES There are a couple of reasons to have many sites: keyword or topic-specific sites that funnel to a main site, coverage of several sub-niches and/or creation of many revenue streams. In the Members Area I cover the major web site design software. If you are going to be creating more than two or three web sites, it pays to do it yourself.

HOW MANY PAGES? If you can create one web page, you can create many. However, increasing complexity means you need web design software that makes it easy to add pages, change the navigation structure, and edit in one spot to change all the website pages. You don’t want to have to change each page individually for a site-wide change.

STATIC OR DYNAMIC? A “static” site doesn’t mean it never changes. It just means that the pages are manually edited. A dynamic site is connected to a server-side database that feeds content based on visitors’ requests. This would include sites based on shopping carts and other sites (even blogs) that don’t have a page with specific content; a page is created “on the fly” when called up.

COMPROMISE STRATEGY For the actual design of your web site, there are many templates available that will get you started. Some are free, most are from $30 – $80. Check out our Resources page for free templates and graphics.

For the money you get the layout structure, style sheets and graphics. Most will still require some editing, but it’s easier to edit a site than create one from scratch.

You can also do the basic site but outsource parts of it, like the graphics or Search Engine Optimization or you may have the whole site professionally designed, but learn to edit the content yourself.