Marc Dane — September 6, 2018 — September 6, 2018
Let’s say, you had a website built for your small business years ago, and it is no longer sufficing for what you have set in terms of business goals. Your website’s traffic has increased, services have expanded, and you’re in desperate need of an inexpensive yet professional-looking website.
Simply put, giving your website a facelift is necessary.
Today, you can hire a web developer to build a shiny new small business website, or build it yourself. If you take the DIY route to create a website, it can also result in a stunning new site that is more cost-effective. There is the investment of a few hours required, and you’ll learn to use a website builder.
The question remains, what if you hired a developer to build your website originally? Repeating the same mistake will only make you regret having done so in a few years when it comes time for another revamp.
As a result, I’d love to propose a simple solution to building a beautiful website in a matter of hours — the use of a website builder.
What is a Website Builder?
Before I dive too deeply into the benefits of building your own small business website, I want to first define what website builders are.
Website builders are unique tools designed for those with little-to-knowledge of the website building process. Through the use of drag-and-drop editors, small business owners can actually build a perfectly-optimized website from start to finish in a matter of hours. Website builders don’t require any experience.
The building process is also very educational and often comes with assistance along the way in which shows you how to navigate the platform. This is usually in the form of tutorials. The major question is:
What does a website builder enable you to do that a developer cannot accomplish?
What to Consider
In considering how much it costs to use a website builder, at most — you’ll pay just over $ 120 each year. This gives you access to full management of your site. One of the major pluses is that you can control your site’s SEO as well as the entire design process.
Hiring a web developer, on the other hand, can lead you down a slippery slope of monthly fees for hosting and maintenance. Let’s not forget the initial cost of planning, building, and ongoing upkeep.
In total, you can pay well into the thousands of dollars to for a website you cannot manage yourself.
1.The Ability to Customize
For starters, you’ll gain the ability to customize your website whenever you want. Time and time again, small business owners make the mistake of spending thousands of dollars on development costs.
This, while often leading to the creation of a beautiful website, actually limits what you can do in terms of customization to your site on a day-to-day basis. Unless you possess extensive knowledge of coding, even performing the most basic of tasks such as adding new content can be challenging.
If you want to change the font, color, theme, or just to update content — you do not have to wait for days or even weeks for changes to be made by a developer, one of the countless advantages of website builders. This occurs because developers typically have more than one client for which they are also managing websites.
With website builders, performing tasks like adding new content, updating meta tags/descriptions, and totally redesigning your site is possible. There are also a number of additional FREE tools available that will help further customize aspects of your small business website.
2. You Know Exactly What You’re getting for your Money
For small business owners, every nickel and dime is important. There is no extra money to throw away for frivolous-spending developers who charge for monthly hosting and upkeep fees. With website builders, hosting, along with customer is included in the monthly or annual package.
With this duo, users can do nearly everything they wish in order to customize their site.
The other major benefit of selecting a website builder is that each feature and fee is explicitly spelled out. Providing these details can create a level of transparency that is simply unmatched.
What I mean is, depending on the package you choose, there will literally be a list of features that are and are not able to access with the purchase of a website building plan. This includes everything from unlimited storage, to unlimited RAM, access to eCommerce features, blogging capabilities, and secure payment portals.
The list continues.
3. You’ll Save Valuable Time
It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to develop a new website from the ground up. Choosing a website builder will allow you to shave a significant amount of the annoying waiting period in between your website being built and going live.
There is an initial investment of time and resources, but this is not something that’s impossible to overcome. It could be as easy as playing with the website builder for a few hours to get a feel for its capabilities.
At most, writing engaging content, designing your small business website, optimizing and double checking it still has the potential to take exponentially less time than hiring a web developer to perform the tasks.
Final Thoughts
Bringing your small business into the 21st Century should not be a difficult task to accomplish It should be made as simple as humanly possible. I do firmly believe that was the goal in the creation of website builders — convenience.
Today, we live in a culture where we are expected to have a professional website for potential customers to locate information about the establishment. This all ties into providing a great user-experience for those who visit our sites and for search engines as well.
So, take my above three tips and build the best small business website you can, while saving time, money and gaining the ability to add advanced customizations to your site.
Business & Finance Articles on Business 2 Community
(48)
