Bryan Williams

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Posted: January 12th, 2010 in Web Development. 3 Comments

So you know you need a website, or perhaps you already have a website but it’s being hosted by some free limited service. They had a catchy ad that said you could create an amazing website with anything you wanted, without any experience necessary. The more you use them however, the more you find out just how limited and frustrating they are. There are a lot of benefits of creating a site yourself or having a website custom created for you. Two of the biggest benefits that I always talk to people about are how important it is for a custom experience and the fact that you own and control all of your own content.

• Fully custom experience: Say you have a blog through blogger. It works fine, you change the background image and font color every-once-in-a-while, but you always have hated the way that pictures upload. It’s a long buggy process and you wish you could just upload an entire album. Maybe you want to add a footer or change the layout a bit. Having your own site means the sky is the limit. The ability to add features to already templated systems is near impossible (except a few plugins usually) but if you have your own site time and money is your only limitation.
• You own and control all of your content: I know this is completely hypothetical and unlikely to happen soon, but what would happen if officelive.com suddenly went away? A virus wipes out the whole thing or something happens to the company that causes the service to instantly shut down. What happens to your free business website? Content, information, everything is now no longer accessible. You haven’t paid for anything, you don’t own your right to that content. This isn’t an attack on officelive, something like this could happen with any service. Paying for your own website means you own your own content and you have complete control over it.

You can enjoy these benefits by actually designing and developing a website yourself or having one custom built for you. But which one of those right for you?

Finding a good designer and/or developer can be difficult. I’ve known a lot of people that have gone out on the web and hired the first cheap designer/developer they could find, only to have heartache when the project is almost completed and now no longer can get in touch with their developer. Sounds crazy but it happens, a lot. I’ve been asked by many to finish or start over a project that where another developer just disappeared. On the flip-side to that, a good designer and developer could cut off years of work to your website.

That’s a big mistake I’ve found with do-it-yourself type websites. Yes someone got a website up very cheap, but it does not perform at all like it was meant to. Professional designer and coders have often been doing it for years, with a lot of different types of projects under their belt for experience. Their knowledge and talent can shave off years worth of work and frustration on a site. Not to mention they have the tools to do this effectively. Did you know for instance that the same website can and does often look different in different browsers? on different operating systems? and screens? Did you know that search engines read your site much differently than a human does? Web design and developers have tools and experience to help them address these challenges that the average user doesn’t have.

But sometimes an agency or developer is just simply out of the budget or perhaps you just are curious and want to get started in the world of web publishing, like I did several years ago. I remember being very confused and frustrated at times. I decided I wanted to share what I learned and hopefully make your experience a better one. After all web publishing can be very exciting and fulfilling. To know that your content will be broadcasting to the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I can’t tell you how excited I was the morning that I woke up to find an email in my inbox from Australia, a guy who just wanted some advice on a topic I made a video about. How exciting. So whether you’ve decided you just want to learn more about the web, your jumping into your very own first web project, or even if you’ve done web work before, feel free to read my upcoming posts and please leave comments. I’d love to answer any questions or comments you may have.

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