If you’re concerned with the high costs of website development and management fees, you might want to consider to do it yourself and build your own business website. Not only will this save you a lot of money, it also eliminates the frustration of working with web developers and gives you total control.
Lack of autonomy over your website is the one thing small business owners complain about all the time to me. Frustration over how long it takes to make one small change on their site. Then comes the big invoice of the web developers fees. You could have done the changes in seconds or your own staff member could have done it for a quarter of the price.
In these economic challenging times, small business owners would do well to consider shifting their focus from outsourcing to in-house development using their administrator or personal assistant. This can be a big leap for some small business owners or sole traders because now you think that you have to put your time and resources in to learning complicated HTML or web development software and so it goes in the too hard basket.
Web developers profit form the myth that building a business website is complicated and difficult and only technical people can do it. But today with the variety of professional website builders, open source templates and so on, there is no reason why you can’t do it yourself of have a staff member do it for you.
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 doing to build your own business website. It is possible to build a professional website that is robust and scalable without learning complicated HTML.
The other bear-bug of the small business owner is when your web developer goes under or disappears to a mountain top 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 and so you. You often loose total control over your web presence.
This is probably one of the major reasons I now use a staff member to build business websites for me, or do it myself if I have the time. I’ve developed a series of videos that shows them how to do this from the beginning of downloading open source templates all the way to the end including search engine optimization, internet marketing and traffic generation.
Now if a staff member leaves I don’t have to loose my time in training a new staff member to administer the site, I simply give them the video training. This has cut my cost of web development tremendously so I can focus on my core business. I hope you have enjoyed this presentation and that in these uncertain times take back control and build your own business website yourself, or within your organisation.
Andy Thomas is a small business owner and product developer who understands the problems businesses face when looking to develop a web presence. He has designed a DIY product showing small businesses how they can use Open Source and Search Engine Optimization to build business websites without the high cost of paying a web developer. For more information on how to build business websites.
When it comes to choosing web design courses there are many options from online web design courses, traditional training at a design school and tutorials that may also include site building tools like General Public License Software tutorial. Whatever you choose from the variety of web design courses to choose from will depend on why you want to do the course.
