Do you need a website for your business (or are you are looking for a redesign)?
Stop pretending like you are constructing a bridge across continents.
You might not think of it much, but using a DIY Website Builder like Weebly or Mozello can save you tons of money that you would be better off spending elsewhere.
Use Webflow, Wix, Duda, and many others available today. If nothing, just pick up hosting and get a WordPress website.
Why you ask? I can write it in a single line: you won’t get it right, you’ll lose money, and you can spend money elsewhere.
You will accrue indirect savings, and avoid the opportunity cost.
We could then throw in wasted time learning, practicing, and doing your due diligence of giving those precious “10,000 hours” as Malcom Gladwell writes in his popular book, The Outliers.
If you need a website, you could put it up in a day. A website builder averages $10 per month (including hosting, which you’d need anyway).
Wondering how a website builder saves you money? Here’s how:
The wrong website, sorry
Getting things right for your website (assuming you’d like to tick off all the points needed to get your strategy together, to maximize profits) is complicated.
Everyone seems to have an “idea” about how they want their websites to be.
I need pink color on the header.
Upload this image here and not there.
My product is unique. My website should be unique.
This is how I want my website to be.
What “you” think or feel about your website is immaterial. What matters is how many leads your website generates. Or how much of a branding pack does your website make?
If your website never got you business yet, it’s pointless.
The “Looks good” fallacy
Too many businesses decide if a website is good or bad by the way it looks.
Looks are deceiving. Good looking sites don’t mean a thing for you while a few ugly looking sites are laughing all the way to the bank.
Show me an ugly profitable site and I’ll show you at least 10 websites in return that look good but didn’t make a single dollar yet.
You are not in competition for looks; you are competing for profits (or at least for survival)
Study. Do. Study. Do
Education is expensive. If you were an individual or a small business owner itching to create websites for yourself, you’d have to learn a bunch of technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, My SQL, Javascript, J Queries, or even server side programming – depending on what kind of website you are looking to build.
Offline education can easily cost you an arm and a leg, and doesn’t make any sense to invest in that. Online education also sets you back by anywhere from $15 to $120 per month (books and other reference material not included).
Hint: Learning coding alone can set you back by $400 per year on study material alone.
Note: I am not suggesting that education is bad. Please do pick up courses over the weekend or whenever. I am just stating this: don’t reinvent the wheel; not for website design.
The Time You’d Never Get Back
Choosing to “learn and do” website design is a choice that’ll cost you the time you’d use to run your business, build your team, and do things you should really be doing.
Assuming it takes you a year to learn HTML and CSS basics along with another year to get anywhere near average skill level with coding, you’d have lost a couple of years.
Sometimes, 2-3 years is all it takes for a startup to gain the tipping point (AirBnB and Evernote, each worth millions of dollars, case in point).
Thirty Party Software
Building websites – with the exception of DIY website builders – can cost you professional software such as Adobe’s Suite of products. Adobe’s Suite of products can cost you around $50 per month (depending on where you live).
This is a recurring subscription that adds up to $600 per year. You’d then spend another $360 on a premium hosting account, along with all kinds of tools you’d need to build that website.
Give this setup about 7 years and you’d have paid more than $7000 for one-time work or just for a few websites.
Subscriptions To Pillars of Support
If you choose not to use a DIY website builder, you’d need a couple of other subscriptions to keep your website up. Premium hosting (because shared hosting sucks) Security software, a Content Delivery Network (to make your website load fast), cost for using stand alone software for emails, and more.
Add each of these up and you’ll easily rack up more than a few thousand dollars in the average it takes a webmaster to realize that you are overspending for things you’d find a usual DIY website builder package.
Ongoing costs for conversion optimisation
In digital marketing, conversion optimization is big. It’s a single, ongoing activity that turns your website from a digital brochure to a humongous money-maker.
If you had to depend on yourself (or others) for website design, you’d never get this as a part of the website development package (yet, this is exactly what you need).
As Peep Laja of ConversionXL writes,
If you’re currently converting at 1% (1% of your visitors buy your stuff), but can increase that to a mere 2%, you’ve doubled your sales.
Your website is never a done thing. The only way you can save thousands of dollars on ongoing conversion optimisation is when you cut down the time it takes to make a website go live and spend time and resources on CRO.
Conversion optimizations lowers the costs of customer acquisition, helps maximize profits, frees up cash (otherwise spent on useless SEO gimmicks and pointless ad spending), and makes you a winner.
Winners take everything.
The Big Fat Opportunity Cost
Every choice we make is setoff against a choice we didn’t make.
Instead of spending your precious time building a website (which you could easily outsource or build one using a web builder), you could be hustling, networking, doing a few things that can change the way you do business, hire more people, and more.
You might not realize it but a few decisions we make can prove to be expensive. Are you making these expensive mistakes?