Hiring A Designer Or DIY?
Designing a successful website is not just for people with an IT degree. You can learn all you need to know to compete in the world of online business if you are willing to take the time to learn how. There is so much information around that can be found free and where these sources leave gaps, there are many books that expand the details. The important question whether you should do it yourself or hire someone boils down to "Do you have the knack?"
One of the reasons I dread doing a website for others, aside from the fact that most people cannot pay me enough to do it for them, is most do not know exactly what they want. All they know is they want it to look good and get a lot of traffic.
They cannot define exactly what look they want and how much traffic they are after. Even those who know how much traffic they want don't have the related content or a service that would warrant the traffic they think they should get.
Then there are those who want you to violate copyright laws and make their site EXACTLY like a competitor's site and cannot understand why it is unethical for you to do it.
Even worse are those that tell you they want one thing and when they see it they say they want something else altogether because they cannot express exactly what they want and complain about the hours put into designing the site.
It is about the same as going into a taxi and telling them you want to go someplace special and give them a vague description of someplace special, but you leave it to them to decide on what is special. When you get there, you do not like that place at all and demand another type of special place which is a revised version of what you stated. You get there and you are still not satisfied and ask to go someplace else. Eventually, you settle for something which is not exactly what you want and you resent paying the cab fare.
Before you do the dance with a professional designer, know EXACTLY what you want your site to look like, how you expect it to function, and pre-written content and sales script in hand. Draw a picture of the look you want to have which includes color, font type, content size, location of navigation tools and search engines and so forth.
A web designer merely designs the site and it is not their responsibility to come up with your content. Web design is a completely different job and a different set of skills from a writer. There is more profit in having your own well-built site versus making one for others if you are both a designer and a writer. If you have so little interest in the direction of your site that you leave every detail in the hands of a designer, you are at their mercy.
It is, after all, YOUR site. If the web designer had the option to be paid by the hour or the page for doing the design and content of a website for you versus doing the same for themselves for the benefit of full profit over a longer period of time for the same work, don't you think the choice is obvious? It is one thing to have a professional give your site a certain look and give you a template to work with or to insert your content into the template, but it is a whole other thing when you ask them to do every little thing.
Write your own content. It is the content that makes your site different from all the millions of sites out there. If you cannot come up with content, hire a writer within your company so you will own the copyright to the content on your site. If you expect a web designer to come up with content, expect to pay a lot more money for their time and any research they need to do.
Also, as the writer developed the content for your site, unless it is explicitly agreed to in writing, they can take the content made for your site and use it again somewhere else. The specific copyright laws have not evolved to cover this yet, but as it stands a person who writes content for someone else for a website without an agreement to sell the website owner full rights still owns the content.
A web designer is an artist with technical skills. If you cannot describe your exact vision, you leave a lot to the imagination of the designer. Unless YOU come up with an exact vision, don't complain when you hire a designer to do a site for you if you are not satisfied with the finished product.
Just be sure you have looked at their work they have done for others before you hire them. If you do not like their previous work or if it is full of errors, you should consider it a warning about hiring such a person. If you like their other sites and they have a good reputation, they would be good to hire, but if you do not have a clear vision, you will spend a lot of money because good designers charge by the hour or by each page designed including re-doing a page. A designer who charges by the page may seem cheaper on the surface unless you really understand each and every time you ask them to change the page it is a new charge.
A professional designer may be as little as $15/hour or $25/page all the way up to $125/hour or $500/page. Developing a template alone may cost you anywhere from $15-$5000.
The advantage to paying a professional to design a template is you can save more in the end because you merely insert your content into the proper areas and you do not have to worry about the other technical details of the structure which makes the page appear as it is. It requires a very basic knowledge of web design to put content in your areas and to know what not to touch, but it is a good way to go if you do not have the knack and don't want to spend a lot of money in creating a big website with frequent changes.
For instance, if you are planning a mall website, a template would suit you if you have more than 100 stores in the mall. A designer charging $50 by the page would charge you over $5000 just to get you started and each time a store went out of business or needed an update, there would be an extra charge. However, if you had the template, you could spend the $5000 on a really good design just once and update it all yourself for free.
If you do not want to take a chance of paying out too much money for a professional designer, you can do it yourself by learning the basic skills. It is not that hard, but it does take time to read over what you need to know and even more time to put it into practice. Whether you do it yourself or pay someone to do it, a good site will take time to build.
By learning basic skills, you can create exactly what you want and save more money. Yes, it does take up a lot of your time. This is why many choose to pay someone to do it for them. However, if you are paying someone by the hour, consider the time you may be saving will be costing you money. Time is a valuable commodity.
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