Benefits of DIY Website Design
In this lens I'm going to plead the case to small business owners, to DIY website design in-house rather than pay the high cost of outsourcing web development and management fees.
In my last lens titled Small Business Website Solutions I said that the upfront web development is only a small part of the total cost of ownership of your website. In this lens I will cover how you bring your total cost of ownership of your website down by doing the work in-house as well as how to solve the problems you might think are associated with in-house DIY website design.
Firstly let's understand that technology has come so far today that website design is not the difficult and time consuming task it once was. You don't need to learn HTML or complicated software programs like Dreamweaver. You may not be aware of it but most web development companies are now turning to open source for their templates, so much of the design of websites is now being done for free or a very small license fee by top designers and web developers globally. When you hire a web developer who uses open source templates their job now is to point and click the mouse to configure your website components and copy and paste text into the template.
Now they charge you anything from $40-$150 per hour to do basic admin tasks that can be performed by yourself or your own staff. Web developers profit form the myth that building a business website is complicated and difficult and only technical people can do it. They also profit from the myth that you can't afford to put the time aside within your main core business to get the job done in-house.
But today with the variety of professional website builders, open source templates and so on, there is no reason why you can't take on DIY website design or have an admin staff member do it for you for as little as $15-$30 per hour (hourly rate depends on what country you are in).
In my last lens titled Small Business Website Solutions I said that the upfront web development is only a small part of the total cost of ownership of your website. In this lens I will cover how you bring your total cost of ownership of your website down by doing the work in-house as well as how to solve the problems you might think are associated with in-house DIY website design.
Firstly let's understand that technology has come so far today that website design is not the difficult and time consuming task it once was. You don't need to learn HTML or complicated software programs like Dreamweaver. You may not be aware of it but most web development companies are now turning to open source for their templates, so much of the design of websites is now being done for free or a very small license fee by top designers and web developers globally. When you hire a web developer who uses open source templates their job now is to point and click the mouse to configure your website components and copy and paste text into the template.
Now they charge you anything from $40-$150 per hour to do basic admin tasks that can be performed by yourself or your own staff. Web developers profit form the myth that building a business website is complicated and difficult and only technical people can do it. They also profit from the myth that you can't afford to put the time aside within your main core business to get the job done in-house.
But today with the variety of professional website builders, open source templates and so on, there is no reason why you can't take on DIY website design or have an admin staff member do it for you for as little as $15-$30 per hour (hourly rate depends on what country you are in).
How DIY Website Design Can Save You Mega Money
When you consider someone has to spend time working with the developer to get all the pictures and content down, this is exactly the same time they could be putting in to build your own website.
The other bear-bug of the small business owner is when your web developer goes under or disappears to meditate for a year, no one knows the password, how to get into the site to change it, how to re-direct the domain name to a new web host. You often loose total control over your web presence.
DIY website design gives you total control over both your budget and your long term presence on the web. Now all you have to get over is the time it will take your admin staff to put your site together, which is time out of your core business tasks.
Depending on how complicated your website it going to be it can take as little as a day or a week if you are using Open Source templates (free-$65 for a template). Remember your web developer would have most likely being using these and charging you premium dollar for the privilege of the very technical task of using a mouse to point and click and copying in text.
Even if you hire a temp, at their hourly rate you still come out on top. Now all you need is someone who knows how to use open source software and templates to customize them with your graphics. And that problem is very easily solved with video tutorials that are available for $150-$300 for the professional level series. That means to total cost of your website is $150-$365 plus the time of your staff. Still a lot cheaper than a website design company or web developer.
With video tutorials no time is wasted in training as you build the website while you follow the tutorials. If your temp or staff member leave you, have no downtime in retraining staff as you have the tutorials to plug them in to.
Think of the savings you make using open source with video tutorials over the total lifespan of your website. The total cost of ownership when you DIY website design is tremendous and well worth consideration.
See my other lenses on Open Source Business Solutions and the Simple New Web System for more information on how to DIY website design.
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Small Business Web Solutions
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by SmallBusinessWebSolutions
SmallBusinessWebSolutions
Hi there, I'm Andy. I'm a small business owner and product developer who understands the problems businesses face when looking to develop a web presence... more »
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