The benefits of building a website or online store yourself

If you enjoy building things and constantly push yourself to improve by taking on challenges, creating a website or online store can be a great way to fulfil yourself. Of course, building a website for the first time will take time, and you’ll need plenty of patience and persistence. But the result shouldn’t disappoint – you’ll not only express yourself, but also learn a lot of new things!

Building a website can take a few days or several months – it depends on how complex the project is. But however long it takes, content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal or others let you apply all kinds of solutions that make the work easier. So building a website yourself is a great option if you want to save money and learn a lot – though it’s also a process that demands focus. Let’s go over the pros and cons.

The benefits of building a website or online store yourself:

• You’ll gain experience! Building a website yourself means you’ll constantly be learning. Search properly and you’ll find answers to any question that comes up while building and coding. Google or other search engines will help, and you can also get plenty of information and specific advice on various forums from people already experienced in the field, or even professionals. The knowledge you gain will be easy to apply in the future!
• You’ll express yourself! If you’re a creative person and value the creative process more than time or money, you’ll see building a website as a great way to spend your free time: you’ll get to solve all sorts of problems and, in the end, admire the result of your work.
• You’ll save money! Building it yourself saves money: you won’t need to hire a developer, a web designer, a copywriter and so on – you’ll do it all yourself. Of course, it would be wise to work out how much time it will take – perhaps by entrusting your website to professionals you could put your own time to better use.

The drawbacks of building a website or online store yourself:

• It takes time. Time is exactly what you’ll need most when building a website yourself. If you’re a skilled website builder, it’ll take less time, but if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll have to invest more. The design isn’t the main problem – it’s harder to construct the right site structure so that it’s easy to manage and user-friendly, and to handle complex page programming, such as finding a bug in the page code and fixing it. Of course, problems can be solved by reading comments found on Google about how to fix such errors.
• You may run short on knowledge. Creating a website that lives up to your expectations and vision requires a great deal of learning. Even the simplest content management systems, such as WordPress, call for a basic understanding of a website’s structure and how it works. You also need to be able to make at least minor changes to PHP and HTML code. And if you want a site with distinctive design, you’ll need to know CSS. Of course, you can find plenty of paid and free tutorials, guides and forums online.
• You may make mistakes. When you’re starting out building a website, mistakes are unavoidable. If you can’t fix them yourself, you’ll need to turn to a specialist. There are quite a few freelance website designers out there, but bear in mind that their services are expensive. Sometimes fixing an error can cost as much as building a new site.

If, after reading all this, you’re still unsure about building a website or online store yourself, get in touch – our prices are affordable for everyone! Tell us what you need, define your vision, and we’ll send you a quote; within a reasonable timeframe (depending on your requirements) you’ll have a professionally built website.