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Why you SHOULD use a DIY site building service

  • John Cole

    Co-founder and Director of Development for Sitegeist

There are thousands of DIY site builders out there–my Google search for ‘site builder’ returned 865M results, they’re obviously not all site builders, but still–and they can make site creation a breeze. They are cheap (or free), intuitive, and don’t require much tech knowledge.

The main reason people DIY anything is because it’s inexpensive or free. So let’s do a comparison; free vs me.

Let’s look at a simple site. A one-pager, no blog.

I am a professional web developer. I’ve been making websites for more than 15 years. If I was going to set up a site with a website builder, something like WIX, this is about how long it would take me:

  • Wix set-up - 1 hour
  • Theme selection - 2 hours
  • Image selection - 1 hour
  • Page build - 5 hours
  • Testing - 2 hours
  • SEO - 1 hour

So, for me, that’s a total of about 12 hours. I charge $150/hour => $1800.  Now maybe you won’t worry about SEO or testing, you’ll assume that the theme is already set up fine. So that’s 9 hours => $1350.

So that’s a win for DIY, right? DIY is free!

Or is it?

Let’s look at what you would do to build the same site.

First, question, do you think that you can work as quickly as I do? I’ve built hundreds of websites. It is literally my job. Even if I’ve never used WIX before (which I have) I can probably figure out how it works pretty quickly. Can you?

Look at it this way. Have you ever done any plumbing work around your house? Have you ever watched a plumber do the same job? I can see some of you nodding your heads right now (okay, I can’t, I have aphantasia, but I can imagine). I know that doing something simple, like changing the toilet fill valve, takes me about an hour. I’ve seen a plumber do it in five minutes.

So let’s say that it takes you twice as long as I, the professional, to set up your website. That puts you at 18 hours.

Another question, do you know about best practices for home page UX? Do you even know what UX is?

UX is tech speak (or jargon) for user experience. User experience is what a user of your website experiences (duh) when they use your website. Good UX is the backbone of a website that actually converts visitors into customers. I assume you want to make money with your website?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a specialist in UX design, but as mentioned I have built a lot of websites, so I have a good idea of what works. But even better I have a team, and a member of our team is a UX specialist. So part of that 5 hours is working with our UX person to make sure the site is set up correctly.

I took a look to see what it would take to brush up on your UX design skills. Codeacademy has an Intro to UI/UX Design course for free. It says approximately 5 hours to complete. So now we’re up to 23 hours.

One more question, do you know what kinds of images you should use for your site?

There’s an art to picking images for a website. It’s more than grabbing some stuff from Unslpash and uploading them. Specific images evoke specific responses. 

I’ll be the first to admit, this is not my forte. But again, we have someone on our team for that. That hour of looking for images isn’t me. It’s my teammate. They’ll pick the perfect images (and we have access to paid resources as well, giving us more to choose from). And then I’ll optimize the images.

Wait, you don’t know about optimizing images? It’s pretty important. You need to make sure that they’re optimized not to slow down your site. A slow site can keep people from even staying on your site.

I’d say we can add another three hours to learn about choosing and optimizing images. So that puts you at 26 hours.

Okay, let’s stop here. 26 hours. That’s a little over half a week of work. 

Let’s see how much those 26 hours are worth. 

The median men’s income is about $62k, or about $25/hour. So your DIY ‘free’ website cost  $650. So you saved about 50%.

But I think that’s a strange way to look at it. Are you doing this during your normal business hours? Probably not. It’s probably a nights & weekends type of thing. For me, that’s my most valuable time. That’s family time and rest time and playtime. I value that at least at $100/hour. If we use that for our calculation you’re free site cost $2600, or almost double.

Or how about we say it’s even? Your site costs as much as mine. So you broke even.

I guess I lied, because I have one more question, do you remember the story about the plumber?

The reason I saw the plumber fixing the same thing that I had fixed. When I installed the fill valve I didn’t do it correctly. It lead to issues, including a low water level that made the toilet not flush correctly, then overflow and partially flood our master bedroom.

So if you want to:

  • Spend 20+ hours
  • Learn about UI/UX
  • And end up with a site that's not as good as a professional site

Then you should use a DIY site builder to build your site.

*One more note, I wouldn’t actually make a site on WIX. We have template sites that start at $1000.

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