Your First Business Website: Build It Yourself or Outsource?

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>The November 2013 web server survey by Netcraft estimates there are more than 785 million websites currently operating.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>If you are planning to create a new website or redesign an existing one, consider if you will get a better result by building the site internally or by hiring an outside person or team.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Think about the impact the website will have on your business, and then check the following tasks to see how they should be completed to support your goal.

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Get Your Domain Name

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>The Site Wizard describes a number of steps to complete a website, and the very first is to purchase your domain. This is the website address by which your website will be found. For example, www.Amazon.com is the domain for Amazon. This is something you can do yourself, but you’ll benefit from the help of a PR person. They will know the marketing value of the right domain name for your company.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Another helpful tip is to sleep on a domain name once you’ve come up with a great idea. In a few days it may not seem like the best idea. Take, for example, the real estate site specializing in finding holiday rentals in Spain called Choose Spain. The company’s domain name is choosespain.com, which probably hurt when it discovered what it had done.

Get Your Web Hosting

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Your web host is where your website resides so people using the Internet can get to it. There are many companies offering this service. Prices range from free to hundreds of dollars each month, depending on the features you need. Note that free hosting normally means putting up with annoying ads that pop up when a visitor hits your website.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>A quick review of web hosting companies shows that many offer services from $10 a month and up. For $10 you’ll get a place to build your website, email, file upload and download capability, and even tools to build a website. You can upgrade your service once you need more security, such as SSL or VPS, or more functionality, such as a shopping cart and payment processing.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>You’ll discover that there are many types of web hosting. Among the various platforms, consumer cloud storage is becoming a viable option. Cloud hosting is growing in popularity because of the various tools that the service provides as well as security, unlimited storage space and anytime-anywhere access.

Designing and Building a Website

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>You now need to decide what kind of website to build and how to build it. PC Advisor suggests taking a hard look at what you’re capable of doing and how much time you have to spend learning about and completing the work. It’s necessary to know the following areas to be able to build a website yourself:

• Online marketing: What is the best website design for your business? A website for an after-market auto parts company will be different than an infant’s clothing retailer.
• Graphic design: Websites are a visual marketing tool and you’ll need to know how best to use colors, fonts and layout to capture your visitor’s attention. You’ll also need to know how to use just the right number and types of images to make your website interesting.
• Web development: This is the actual building of the website. It could be as simple as learning how to configure modules that have already been created, such as with WordPress. Or it could mean writing programming code, such as HTML or PHP. Websites are often a combination of tools and if you’re not already familiar with them, the learning curve can be steep.
• Content copywriting: This is the creation of the content for your website. It is all of the words used from product descriptions to blog posts. A good knowledge of how people view websites is needed. You’ll also need to understand search engine optimization, or SEO, which is how to write content so that the search engines, such as Google, will rank your website high in the search results.

Internal or Outsource?

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>A list of various tools you can use to build a website is available at Digital Trends. The question is how much time do you want to spend learning about these tools and the above roles. Small businesses find that they have some of the skills internally and need to outsource the other tasks.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>For example, you may have people that write well and understand SEO to do the content or have a marketing person who knows websites as well as some graphic design. You’ll want to take an inventory of the skills within your organization to see what you can actually complete internally.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>The other consideration is time. Website development can take weeks of dedicated effort. If you have staff with the skills, can they afford the time to do this project? You will want the best possible outcome from a website project so make sure you can support the time to do it right.