The Importance of Choosing Your Web Development Solution Wisely based on What Features or Flexibility you need.

New businesses to website building are often highly tempted to use an online website builder or website maker which is a tool provided by the web builder/maker company, for a few reasons:

Pre-built Templates

The website builders/makers come with a selection of pre-built templates for your website. As such, you don't really have to think about the website design. Creating your website with the website builder is simply a matter of choosing the appearance you want to have.

Step by Step Wizard

The website builders typically provide a step-by-step wizard, that takes you through the steps of selecting a design and entering your website information. It gives you the impression that the whole process is very easy, and doable.

No Need to Upload Files and Whatnot

Since you design your website online, with the website builder/maker tool, there's no need for you to upload (publish) your web page and images.

The website builder creates the files directly in your web builder account.

To new businesses, the process of uploading a website can seem daunting at first, and so this painless procedure has tremendous allure.

Why You Should Not Use the Online Website Builder/Maker If You Can:

I recommend you forgo the online website builder/maker and learn to use an offline, standalone web editor or work with a reliable web developer.

In the short term, this may seem like it increases the hurdle of getting your website onto the Internet, but there are far-reaching long-term benefits.

Flexibility, Control, and Transferability of Skills

Building your website using a website builder only seems easy on the surface since it provides the illusion you don't need to dream up the visual appearance of your website.

You can simply use their provided templates.

But despite what newbies OR new online businesses think, designing a website is more than creating a pleasing visual look. There are far more important aspects to web design, including usability and search engine friendliness.

As you learn more about these things, you will want to modify your website so that it is more usable and search engine-friendly. 

When you limit yourself to a website builder/maker, you are surrendering flexibility and total control in exchange for initial ease of use.

Now, of course, it's possible that some site builders provide you with the facilities to modify every aspect of your web pages. To do that, you will probably have to spend time learning the interface and working with it (or even around it) to accomplish your task. 

Why bother?

• All the skills you acquire in working with the website builder are not transferable. 
• The moment you leave that web host, you have to re-learn everything again. 
• You might as well have spent the time learning a standalone web editor using WordPress. 
• Your skills will then be usable no matter which web host you use, even if they don't provide a website builder.

Content

When I said that using a website builder/maker provides you with the illusion of ease of use, I really meant it. 

The most important part of the time creating any website is drafting your content, whether it is your product description, sales pitch, or some other thing.

When you use a website builder, you still have to invest time and energy in writing that content. 

There is no shortcut.

If the pretty face of the online site maker/builder led you to think that creating a website will take you no time at all, think again. The only one that can generate good content is you.

The website builder or maker will not write it for you. 

All it can create are the pseudo-Latin "lorem ipsum" gobbledygook meant as placeholders for your real text.

Transferability of Web Design: Are You Locked into Your Web builder/maker account?

I have had visitors writing to me to tell me about how their website was locked to a particular web host because they used their host's website builder. The template and graphics used by the builder were copyrighted and licensed to them for use on their website only if the website remained on that host.

If they were to move to another web host solution, they could no longer use that template.

This, I think, is the most serious problem of all.

Does your website builder tie you to your web builder/maker account? 

Will you be able to move to another web host solution simply by transferring all the files to the other host? If you find that the terms of use of those templates do not allow this, you should not even consider using the site builder. 

Never allow your website to be locked into any web builder/maker account. If the company deteriorates, or unreasonably increases its rates, or even goes out of business, your website and your business will be held hostage.

There are too many advantages to having to own your own platform and not using a website builder or maker:-

1. You get complete control you can make any change in any layout.
2. It will be Scalable to any possibility
3. You can add on or remove any feature as per your requirement
4. You get a lot of control from a development point of view, that you won't get in builders
5. Performance can be tweaked
6. Can use custom CSS and js
7. You can convert a simple website into the portal, CRM, cms, etc. any time you want to that can't be done in any web builder/maker
8. Optimization as per SEO you can not optimize CSS or js or HTML at all.
9. You can integrate many APIs or functionality that Wix or others won't provide.

And so more…

If you want simply a website Brochure that does nothing other than say.. Look, we exist, contact us if you like.. then by all means use a website builder/maker.

If you want to actually stand out and have a website that complements your offline brand and offers the service you do offline then you need a web designer and a coder (Web Developer). 

Looking the same as every other business online isn't going to give you any edge whatsoever.

The website builder/maker has limited functionality.

When you limit yourself to an online site builder or maker, you are surrendering flexibility and total control in exchange for initial ease of use.

All the skills you acquire in working with the website builder are not transferable. 

The moment you leave that web builder/maker, you have to re-learn everything again.

You might as well have spent the time learning a standalone web editor.

Your skills will then be usable no matter which web host you use, even if they don't provide a site builder. With coding, you can use editors ranging from word processors to a plain text editor to write code in HTML, CSS, and other languages needed to achieve full functionality with a modern website. 

Coding allows to implementation of a profound informational architecture of the web project.

By definition, building a website from scratch is synonymous with hand-coding a website.

This is a fairly technical endeavor. 

Thus, it is advised that building a website from scratch is best left in the hands of an experienced web developer.

Benefits of Building A Website from Scratch:

1. Your website gets its own unique custom design
2. No ads will clutter Your website
3. Your website comes with its own unique domain name
4. Your website will be fast with pages loading in under 1 second
5. Your website can easily be tweaked to reap the benefits of Search Engine Optimisation

WordPress allows web developers to customise and add their own coding, It’s not necessary to code a website from scratch though - just choose your web development platform solution wisely based on what features/flexibility you need.

Is it worth learning about website development anymore? 

There are so many tools that allow people to generate websites like Wix, WordPress, site builders, etc.

I’ve been a web developer/designer for the past 10+ years, and this question was there from the start. Back in the prehistory of the Internet, it was “My friend knows HTML, why should I pay you X?” If anything, the value of hiring a good web developer is higher than ever! 

Is it worth learning about website development? Heck, yea - but you’ll sweat for it.

Short answer: Do people go to fine restaurants? Why, when McDonald’s would be so much cheaper? 

They hire web developers for the same reason. You get what you pay for.

Long answer - this is what a good web developer brings to a client:

There are many more websites on the Internet. 

Standing out is harder. Getting on the first page of Google is harder. 

A good web developer takes into account SEO and user interfaces custom-built for you. 

This makes a huge difference in how well, fast and cost-effectively your site will perform.

“Free” website builders or makers will get you an entry-level website.

For anything else, even the most basic necessities like your own domain name, you’ll have to pay a considerably higher monthly fee than you’d pay for a great hosting account for an independent website.

 It adds up over time, sometimes to more than you’d have paid a developer upfront.

Your needs have changed, and you need additional functionality not available out of the box from your “free” provider? Tough luck. You’re locked in - moving your website to a different platform is very often hard or impossible.

Here’s what I do, as a web developer, for my customer:

Intake: I sit down with my client and have a long talk to determine what their needs - as opposed to wants - are. 

This might mean guiding my client to a better solution.

For example, some years back, Flash was all the rage and everyone wanted a pretty, animated Flash site. Thing was, they were awfully bad for Search Engine Optimisation at the time, and some important mobile browsers didn’t include Flash, so a Flash site would have been useless for the new but growing mobile market … and now, Flash is about to go away forever. I do web design. I read industry news daily. I know this stuff, and my clients don’t.

Another example: A client came in and said he wanted a “classy, professional website”. With animated background fireworks, dancing girls and falling snowflakes on each page; and a random pineapple. It was my job to tell him that those are not really compatible. 

Yes, I lost that client, but that’s part of the job - giving clients news that can help them, even if they don’t want to hear it.

Making a plan: After I find out what the goals are, I make a plan to achieve it - this includes brainstorming things that clients might not have thought of (“You have new products all the time - let’s put up newsletter signup so your customers can be notified! Here’s the best solution, and by the way, the law says you must give them away to cancel. This solution takes care of it for you.”), identifying keywords and content that would make for the best SEO (doing SEO research to find the best keywords based on competition as well as popularity), and helping clients organize and create content based on this, determining which platform will work for them now and in 5 years based on the amount of growth they expect as well as savings over time and so on.

Being a Director, Web Developer, and Digital marketer: Once the work starts, I too often end up reminding and chasing a client for necessary materials and answers in order to keep development on deadline. I also get to know them (this is one of the fun parts!) and possibly suggest course corrections in development based on new information and any improvements we could make that I know of, and my client didn’t hear about.

Thinking of important website elements that are not “fun” or immediately related to functionality:

Is your website secure? 

How will you harden it against spam, hacking and DDOS attacks? 
What laws do you have to follow regarding disclosures and customer information? 
Don’t know what DDOS is? Right…

You have a website. What now? 

It’s also my job to give you a realistic idea of how much work it will be to maintain the website, keep it updated, and teach you the most time and SEO-effective ways to create new content, to keep love going with search engines, as well as integrate it into your overall marketing strategy.

Not all web developers/designers do this, but I also work on digital marketing, help create commercial/explainer videos, provide images or shoot your photos, and can build your own tools i.e CRM, PIM, EPOS, Blockchain, or Moblie Apps, etc… but every web developer can remind you of something as basic as making sure your new website is on every business card you own - and yes, I had to remind clients to do this more than once.