These days, having a website for your organisation is indispensable, with almost two-thirds of the world’s population using the internet. Thankfully, the wealth of tools available means that it is easier than ever to design and build your own website, but it might not be the right choice for you.
In this blog we will be looking at some of the things you should consider before you take the plunge and whether hiring a web designer could actually save you time, money and headaches in the long term!
It’s easy to say that you need a website, but it can be harder to define what role it has to play. Of course, this will vary depending on the kind of business or organisation you run, but consider if you need something simple that displays who you are, what you do and how to contact you on a single page or if you need an online shop, appointment booking, photo galleries, subscriber-only content… The list goes on!
Deciding from the beginning what the function of your website is will help you choose how, where and who to build it.
One of the biggest draws of building your own website? It saves you paying someone else to do it! It is even possible to build and share a website for free if you don’t mind some limitations on what you are able to do, such as not having your own domain name (the www.websitename.co.uk part that points to your site) or having the site builder’s branding visible on your page. This is great for testing out a platform and seeing what is possible, but the lack of a recognisable domain name will probably become an issue very quickly.
There are a huge range of paid-for options for a variety of budgets, and here is where considering your website purpose will really help. As a rule of thumb, the more you need your website to do for you and the more visitors you expect to view your pages, the more expensive it will be, so knowing this beforehand will help you choose something that is appropriate for you from the get-go.
Look carefully at the price for your website over months and years. Many companies will offer a discount to new customers, so check what the price will be once that introductory offer expires. Of course, you could change company every time an offer runs out, but the time and effort it takes to move your website regularly might not be worth it in the end!
The trade-off for the money saved is the time and effort it takes to build your own website, and whilst it’s no longer necessary to learn how to create everything from lines of code, it can still be a time-consuming process, especially if you need a large site with lots of pages and products.
Beware of adverts that promise you a pixel-perfect website generated by AI in just a few minutes – it isn’t always that simple. Be prepared to spend some time making sure your layout looks good on everything from a wide-screen desktop PC to a mobile phone.
The more complex and customised you need your website to be, the more likely you are to run into the limitations in some of the easier-to-use platforms. Many of them offer a range of templates you can add your own content and branding to, but if you want to move beyond this and break out of the mould you might start to struggle.
It isn’t just the web pages themselves that need to be created – you’ll need to write content and find or create images to put on your pages. Doing this yourself can be a huge benefit, after all, who knows your business better than you do? Just make sure that you communicate clearly and check your text for any typos before you share it with the world!
You may have sat down and carefully planned out everything you need from your website, but as your organisation grows, that website will need to grow and adapt with it. When you are looking at a site builder see how easy it is to add new functions and whether your costs will increase to accommodate them.
We often use WordPress to build websites for clients and there is a good reason it powers over 40% of the web – the basic platform is free of charge but is compatible with a vast array of add-ons (called plugins) that provide almost any additional function you can think of. Some of them require payment, but there are a lot of free options available as well.
The downside is that WordPress alone can be more difficult to use with a steeper learning curve to get the best out of it, but you can install plugins that provide you with a more visual website-building platform, more like the drag-and-drop builders offered by a lot of other companies.
Just having a website doesn’t mean anyone will find it – there are so many pages out there that cutting through and making sure your audience finds you can be a real challenge. This is where Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, can help.
SEO is a set of tools and techniques that can help your website rise to the top of a list of search results and covers a huge array of different things. SEO is loosely grouped into three categories –
Technical SEO – this is everything “under the hood” of your website that dictates how it is structured, how quickly it loads, how consistent it is across different devices. If you are using a website-building platform a lot of this will already be taken care of for you, and you’ll have a solid foundation to build on.
On-Page SEO – here is where you have the most impact when you are building your own website. Make sure your written content is helpful, relevant and easy to read. Include relevant keywords and phrases that people might be searching the internet for, but resist the temptation to include things just to try and get people to click on your link – if users leave your site in a hurry it will affect your ranking!
Off-Page SEO – helps to show your website is the genuine article. If other websites link to yours it increases how “trustworthy” it appears to a search engine. Make sure you submit your details to relevant directories and groups, or reach out to other companies and organisations to create a network. Just make sure that you stay focused and relevant to your audience.
Just building your website and putting it online is unlikely to be the end of the story. Improvements and updates to the underlying technology will need to be carried out, and whilst most companies will quietly get on with this as part of your subscription, it is worth checking your site regularly to make sure one of these improvements hasn’t broken something on one of your pages!
Updating and changing the content of your site will fall to you, so think about how often it needs to be done and how time-consuming it will be. If you are using your website as an online shop you will need to regularly add new products and remove old ones, which might include taking new photographs or writing descriptions. A specialised platform like Shopify can help to streamline this process, as well as provide lots of powerful tools for taking payments and managing stock levels, but keeping your catalogue up to date will still take some time, so make sure you can set aside a realistic amount of time on a regular basis.
Many sites (like ours) include a blog or news section – this can be updated regularly whilst the majority of the site stays unaltered. A blog is a great way to refresh your content and improve your SEO as well as give people a reason to keep coming back to visit.
Obviously, we are biased – of course you should hire Little Bird Creative to build your website for you – but for some people it is still the best choice to build their website themselves and we hope some of the things we have shared above will help you to do so. If you aren’t sure that you want to go it alone, then get in touch with us for a free, no-obligation chat to work out what the best fit for you will be. We’ve built websites of all shapes and sizes for clients in a range of sectors, but what they all have in common is the unique approach we take for each of the people we work with.
We can advise you if you need a single page that only needs updating every few months or a multiple-page spanning site with all the bells and whistles and we are happy to be as involved as you need us to be once it is complete – we have handed the keys over to clients and wished them well once the website is online, we’ve provided training sessions to teach people how to update their site themselves or we can create brand new blog content for you every month. We pride ourselves on taking a bespoke approach to everything we do, so if you think we might be able to help you, please get in touch!
Ever had one of those days where all it takes is one person saying the wrong thing to totally push you over the edge? What about the reverse, where a kind word turns your mood around completely? The tone we take with others – and they with us – has a far greater impact than we might think. But what about your organisation’s tone of voice?
We’ve talked about the value of using video in your marketing plenty of times before but we’re usually the ones behind the camera, as well as doing the editing.
Whilst most of us are aware that creating legal policies or setting up mass production might be best left to the experts, we often tell ourselves that when it comes to designing flyers to advertise our organisation, or creating a logo for our new business, we can definitely do that ourselves. After all, how hard can it be?!
According to Siteefy there are over a billion websites in the world, with hundreds more created every minute. Standing out from a crowd that large when someone searches the web is a challenge. Google is miles ahead of the competition in number of users, with the first three results it provides getting most of the clicks. Reaching the top of that list is what Search Engine Optimisation is all about.
