We know better now.
My wife and I have just bought our first house. It has been updated, it looks great, and we’re slowly making it our own. When we bought it, we planned on installing our own laminate flooring. We bought a circular saw, read a few how-to articles, and felt generally pretty confident. It can’t be that hard!
Each day after work, my wife and I would come to our new house to work on the floors. We started in the small room to get a handle on the process. To make a long (and painful) story short, 8 hours in, we had only completed about 30 square feet. It was a disaster.
By doing flooring ourselves, we managed to:
- Turn our new house into a source of frustration
- Spend valuable energy
- Waste three nights of our lives
- Burn ourselves out
In the end, we hired a professional. Now the project is done, and it looks great.
Professionals are there for a reason
The whole process has helped me appreciate what I do. I am a professional web designer; this is what I do. Because I do my job well, I help my clients avoid frustration.
No business-owner should do their own website unless they have lots of time, energy, patience, and money to spare. What’s most important to a business is to stay focused on doing what you do.
Not to be discouraging…
I love the web. I love HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and all the design rules and code logic that goes with it. I truly and strongly encourage people to learn web design. My message to you is to dip your does toes before you dive in.
If it seems too much for you, ask for help.
5 replies on “Warning: Create your website at your own risk!”
I think I’d rather dip my toes than my does. 🙂
Yeah, dipping does is really not fun!
Yep,…good websites have loooots of knowledge, experience and failed websites behind it.
You need to know a whole universe of things like content writing, web design, project management and technology.
My advice: read a book or two and learn how to do things right from the beginning.
You will save lots of time this way.
There are lots of good information online these days as well that can help you if you are trying to make small changes or do small websites. Professionals are important though when the project is much larger and you want to be doing something you love rather than something you have no clue about in order to save some money.
Well, let’s take a specific example of SEO like making key phrases headlines instead of paragraphs. That’s something that you very likely wouldn’t know unless you were in the industry or very interested.
Most of my clients don’t really get the internet, and don’t want to have to worry about how the site works. They want something that works, and they don’t care why. When I say the word “code,” their eyes glaze over.
Even worse, when I say the word “code” and their eyes pop open, and they say “I love HTML!, I’m learning CSS” I worry even more. “Learning CSS” and doing it are very, VERY different!