Why creating your own web sites without any web design knowledge can be harmful for your business. Websites play an important role in the growth of any company so everyone is moving towards digital trends of marketing and business expansion. Many business owners tend to create websites on their own rather than hiring professionals. Websites are the first impression of any business which could not be changed. The overlooked components of DIY websites can affect your potential client’s perception of whether you are credible in your field.
DIY website builders occupy considerable space on the World Wide Web with promising ease of development. Coding websites is a time-taking job so people started developing websites with open source web builders. Jumping into such a big task without relevant skills experience in web design can result in various mistakes.
What are DIY website builders?
DIY website builders incorporate graphical tools for developing websites without programming knowledge. Most website builders offer a number of built-in templates so that you can have a rough format for the desired web design theme. DIY website building is a matter of hours for designing a personal or business web portal.
The intuitive web editor could be learned easily to make desired changes to a website. You can select the available templates, drag and drop elements from an online editor and get a personalised website. You can also customise website colours, backgrounds, images and multimedia, map and change content by yourself.
The mistake of DIY websites
Due to the lack of web designing knowledge, everyone cannot make fully-functional websites. DIY websites can save your money but it’s a tedious process to create a professional website. Even if you have a know how of coding, you can still miss a few things. Read out the below section to find about potential mistakes of DIY websites
• No Encryption/SSL available
SSL encryption is how a website creates a secure connection with the user. Google is even ranking sites higher that have SSL encryption. The websites developed with DIY website builders do not incorporate security algorithms for securing data from malicious attacks.
DIY websites can be easy targets, so installing antivirus and purchasing an SSL Certificate is necessary. DIY websites without added security can risk the company’s confidential data.
• Lack of Responsiveness
Creating a responsive website is a difficult task without any web design experience. You have to worry about screen size, clickable link size, fonts, and multimedia. When you design a website using DIY strategies, you aren’t skilled enough to develop a compatible mobile-friendly website.
DIY websites are usually not designed with mobile-first in mind. Google prioritises mobile-first websites in search algorithms, which relates back to SEO. Therefore, if a website is not easily accessible via smartphones, it’s not going to last long.
• Misplaced Branding
A website is a direct reflection of any business, so the content and multimedia should be placed accordingly. DIY website builders lack the expertise of developing a perfectly managed website so the branding does wrong most of the time.
If a product or service is not sited according to potential user requests, they might skip the website as they don’t get what they required. A website should build memorability of a brand in visitors by the right logo, photos, and related content.
• Lack of Traffic and Google Analytics
Google Analytics collects valuable information as a standard for website traffic monitoring. Reviewing the website’s Google Analytics report can help you determine where your best referral traffic comes from to help measure your efforts. DIY websites are recognised by the Google servers thus negatively affecting the analytics.
The number of visitors, how long visitors are staying, how they are getting there and other information is saved. DIY websites don’t include analytics in their services, so the only thing you will be analysing is why no one hitting your website’s link.
• No Call to action
A good quality website must have the capacity to quickly convert visitors quickly into customers. A strong call-to-action is how companies communicate with their customers using websites. If you customize a template, it likely won’t effectively communicate with your customers.
But without a clear and obvious Call-To-Action such as driving visitors to purchase your products or services, sign up to a newsletter, download something from your site, etc., your website is not able to do that. Ultimately, page traffic and sales appear relatively lesser.
• Lack of SEO
If potential customers can’t find your website in Google results, then it might not exist actually. A high search engine ranking ensures that customers will find you on the Internet. DIY websites do not offer search engine optimization which is a key factor to elevate the page ranking and bring it to the top.
Just building a website does not mean that people will find and begin interacting with your business. It is the SEO that brings more traffic to a webpage. DIY website builders proffer practically nothing in the form of SEO.
Check out our article SEO for small businesses
• Complex Navigation
A good website design should be functional as well. If a website isn’t easy for people to navigate through, they stop using it. When people without web design experience create DIY websites, they are unaware of what an average internet user deems as an easy to use the website.
Building a website without web development knowledge can confuse users with navigation. Customers will not be able to find the icons they have been struggling for. A neat and simple website is usually rated as higher than complex ones
• Lack of Consistency and Aesthetics
DIY strategies involve less experienced users, people throw dozens of color schemes onto a web page to make it look better. Whereas, simplicity is the way to go when it comes to designing an aesthetically pleasing website.
Different pages of the same website should be noticeably connected by a visual style. This provides a visual signal to visitors that they are still in the same place. DIY websites lack consistency, aesthetics and multimedia placement so the users feel obnoxious while navigating through them.
• Badly Organized content
Poor content organization is the main issue with DIY websites. Business owners don’t have an idea of where to put their content. They’ll have all the content on one page, forget an about page, forget to include important contact information and more.
For a badly organized website, it’s quite probable that users will not opt to navigate further. The available content at DIY websites is not enough for your users to understand your services. It’s not enough content for the search engines to understand it either.
Conclusion
A DIY web design approach might work a while if you are aware of the above-mentioned mistakes. If you are not skilled enough for building a website, you must get professional services to do so. The website is a significant component for the growth of any business so you should not compromise them at any cost.
Instead of taking risks of creating your site yourself and then rebuilding it later, save your resources by building it from scratch with the help of a website developer. It will not only elevate your sales but bring integrity to your business which will be beneficial in the long run, contact us at Fab Media to get a website right the first time call us on 01484 612569 or email hello@fabmedia.co.uk.