The actual cost of building a DIY website –is it really “free?”
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I get the draw. I’ve DIY-ed every iteration, version, and stage of the websites I’ve had for my business.
The difference though, between me DIY-ing my website now, and me DIY-ing my website when I first got started back in 2015, is that now I know better. 😂 And I really want you to be able to learn from my mistakes!
Building a DIY website in real life
The fact is we don’t know yet what we don’t know.
So here’s what happens, in reality, when you decide to DIY your site with no skills in that area (even if you do have good design instincts):
You decide to build your own website. Yay! Okay, but in what platform?
Then ya research all the platforms & make a decision on which website builder seems like the best fit.
Now, what plan should you choose? Which features do you need? You decide you’ll just start with the basic plan & go from there.
Or, which template should you install? There are so many! 😬
Maybe you try one builder & hate it, then have to start over on another one.
(🙋🏻♀️ I did that! I started on Weebly, then moved to Squarespace after fighting with Weebly’s builder for several months.)
You have to start over, but now you have a better idea of what you want to do, visually, ––but how do you X, Y, or Z on this new website builder?
You don’t know the platform well, so you scour the interwebs for tutorials.
––Okay, so turns out tutorials are a dime a dozen. Who’s got the best tips? Who has the newest info? Who’s an actual authority to learn from?
Maybe you stumble onto a course that teaches you how to use the website builder for something between $800 – $2,500 USD. Perfect! Now you can build your own website with a support network, but you still have lots of questions for the course creator & their support team or their private Facebook community.
Next thing ya know, it’s been days, weeks, months, or even a year and you’re still not happy with the final product. Still tweaking it every time you log on. Still have things you want to do, but can’t figure out how to implement.
OR, maybe you love what you were able to build, and you launch it, …to crickets. No one is buying from you. Inquiries are not landing in your inbox. Your bounce rate (the percentage of people who do land on your website & exit quickly) is nearly 100% –what are you doing wrong?!
Eventually, you might get sick of looking at it all together –or sick of the silent treatment you’re getting from your audience, and hire a pro to start over for you.
Should you DIY your own website?
Without knowing your background specifically, I can’t answer that FOR you, but I can point you in the right direction! Head over here to take the quiz, Cosmo or Seventeen Magazine style.
If you have good design instincts, then you could design something pretty or attractive! But ‘pretty’ isn’t all there is.
Websites are just as much about strategy & psychology as they are about being attractive, easy & fun to use.
What I can say with confidence though, is that every DIY site I’ve ever done in my early stages of web design skill-building, and every DIY site I’ve heard about through others’ experiences, have taken HOURS, DAYS, WEEKS, and are still not launched with 100% confidence.
They can be full of errors, broken links, ––or worst of all, be confusing/hard to navigate or be unclear in what you’re offering, so no one buys/wants to work with you.
Websites have an insanely limited first impression time. Often, the person who lands on our site for the first time decides in a split second whether they want to stay or go, without “reading” anything!
If you can’t grab their attention –and quick– that person is going to bounce. The higher your bounce rate, the lower your rank in Google Searches, and that becomes a vicious cycle that lands you at the bottom of the ocean in a sea of competitors.
The professional promise
No, pro designers can’t (shouldn’t/won’t) ever guarantee that you’ll land on the first page of Google searches on your first launch. To the best of my knowledge, that literally cannot happen; it’s just not how the process works.
But what we can do, is help you save time and money, implementing strategy & design with skills you likely don’t have.
Yes, you might’ve paid us good money to get this done for you –money you wouldn’t have had to spend if you DIY’d your own site– but what we save you is HOURS of trial and error, costing you time & money while your attention is on your website build, instead of money-making activities in your own business.
While YOU focus on building your own website, you’ll have a hard time balancing other revenue-generating tasks like client work, marketing, selling products, attending to sales, creating products, meeting with clients, –whatever it is that brings money into your bank account.
While I focus on building your website, I do all the work for you, freeing you up to continue making money in your business in the interim.
If YOU spend hours on trial-and-error design work, you’ve been costing yourself whatever your hourly wage is worth. Time is money, and if you’re spending it on non-revenue-generating tasks, you’re costing yourself money! Think about it like this:
Let’s say your time is worth $50/hour. If you’ve spent a couple of weeks on building your website while ignoring other business tasks (even the mundane stuff like checking your emails, etc.), and you tend to work on it between 4 and 8 hours a day, you’ve just cost yourself between:
4 hours/day x 5 days/week x $50/hour = $1,000 per week spent designing
8 hours/day x 5 days/week x $50/hour = $2,000 per week spent designing
🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯
Ready to make this even scarier? 😬 What if you forgot to check your email a few too many days in a row and when you finally did you saw potential client inquiries that you’ve missed, who’ve since moved on because they got no response from you. That’s an additional cost of whatever your product/service sells for, times however many opportunities you missed.
So let’s do that math, too. Let’s say…
templates cost $250/ea and you had 6 people email you interested, but asking questions about them
the average conversion rate is between 2-3%, so you’ve lost at least $250 if 1 person had purchased
your coaching package goes for $2,000, and you had 3 inquiries missed
with the average conversion rate of 2-3%, you’ve potentially lost at least $2,000 if 1 person would’ve become a client
If you lost money due to missed opportunities, on top of the time you essentially cost yourself to DIY, we’re already well above the average cost of simple website designs by a less-experienced pro, and fast approaching the cost of paying a mid-level experienced pro.
I won’t tell you not to DIY it
This is always a personal decision, and one many business owners make –I get it because I made the same decision myself. Paying anyone $2,000+ for my first website was not an option. So I feel ya! 1,000%
But it IS worth weighing the pros and cons before you make that final decision, so you know exactly how this endeavor may affect your bottom line and what it will actually cost you in both time AND money. We all know the saying…
Time is money!
…and in your own business, that’s never been more true! So ask yourself:
Where is your time best spent in your business?
Do you need to be spending it doing tasks you’re not good at or don’t understand, which inevitably always take longer than they otherwise would?
Or do you need to be spending your time doing tasks that grow your business?
