Deciding how to make your website
There are many different ways to get a website online: you can pay or beg someone to do it for you; you can learn how to do it yourself (in a technical way) or learn how to do it yourself (in a non-technical way). Which of these routes you choose depends on your level of technical know-how and willingness to learn.
There is a huge sense of achievement to be had from building your own website, but there is also a huge amount of stress if it is beyond your skillset. Someone who is an experienced web designer and builder will be able to do in a few hours what may take you weeks to figure out yourself. It’s also hard to be objective if you have built a site yourself. You know how long it took you to get your logo to spin around when you load the page, so that spinning logo is here to stay!
There are always new technologies being introduced to build websites, and if the last time you tried was 5 years ago then go look again at what tools are available now. Sites like Squarespace and Wix allow you to set up and build your own website using very friendly online design tools in your browser using their online platforms. Services like Shopify let you build your own e-commerce store without writing even a single line of code. Granted, you might not produce something as amazing as a web designer would build for you – but it’s better to get started somewhere rather than hold up promoting your business because you haven’t got a website yet. And again, these technologies always evolve and update, so follow people whose job it is to keep up to date on what you can do on these platforms and tell you everything you need to know.
Using these platforms also mean that you don’t have to take ‘tech responsibility’ for them. If your website goes down in the middle of the day just before you are going into an important Zoom call (and trust me, all websites go down at one time or another), then it’s someone else’s job to fix it – you just send them a message, open a ticket, jump onto live chat and they will respond 24/7. If you are running and hosting a site yourself, you will need to fix it yourself or have a developer on call who can get involved.
But if you are slightly more technical then there are new options for you too. I started out building websites in the 90s and can proudly claim that I had my first commercial website online before Google had theirs! Back then, you wrote HTML in a text editor like Notepad and used FTP to upload your website to a server. Then, new and better ways of building sites arrived like WordPress – but you had to know how to set up and install the software on a server, and that’s when I stopped building websites and started employing developers to do it instead. Now, however, I build all our company websites myself again because the world has gone full circle. A hosting service like Siteground will set me up with a login to a clean install of WordPress, having done all the technical set up for me. Using a page builder plug-in like Elementor I can drag and drop elements live in my browser. And because of my semi-technical background, when needed I can occasionally jump in and do some things with code to customise certain elements. If you have a slightly technical background yourself, or if you are inclined to learn, then there’s no reason you cannot do the same.
Or you can always have your site built by a web designer, but ask them to use a page-builder plug-in or visual editor so that you can update the site yourself. This way you can benefit from having a professional designer put your site together but be in control of day-to-day running, creating new landing pages for your campaigns and update information on the site yourself.
But whatever systems you or your web designer use, make sure that you indeed have that day-to-day control. The wonderful thing about websites is that they are alive. You want to be able to add a new page quickly, or publish a new article yourself or update your product information without always having to call your web designer to book the work in. A good designer will have this conversation with you right at the start of your project and may talk about a CMS (content management system). Just as you want to be able to make changes to your site quickly, they don’t want to have to be on constant call and charge you every time you want to swap a photo on your website.
But what should your website look like? That is a very subjective question! But you already have all the answers. And you know that, again, I’m going to send you back to your customer profiles. A big mistake that small businesses make is that they design a website for themselves, not their customers. Having a site that you love is important – if you cringe every time you paste a link to your site then you’re not going to share it as much – but you need to create a site that your target customer is going to love too.
