Hiring a Web Designer or Using a Website Builder?

Creating a website in 2020 is one of the easiest decisions you can make for your business. Your website is a commodity of your business that should generate values. It is the backbone of your whole brand and will act as the face of your business.

Since owning a website for your any purposes is out of the questions. The discussion revolves around – Hiring a web designer or creating your website by using a website builder. Both sides will come with their own set of pros and cons.

This is where your decision making comes.

The good news is there is no certain right or wrong answer to this question. There are plenty of factors that play role in deciding which path is best for you. In the end, you want to ensure you receive good ROI to make it worth your time and money.

To guide you make the right decision, here in this blog, we have analyzed various advantages and disadvantages to each option. By the time you finish this blog, you have a clear picture in your mind whether your business would make more profits from hiring a web designer or building a website using a website builder would be the best option for you.

Before You Start: Understand Your Needs

Before you move to make a decision whether a web designer or website builder is right for you, you need to understand your needs or goals of having a website. Examine all the different pages, features, and functions of your website you might need according to your business or any general goal.

For example,

• Do you want customer purchasing something?
• Do you want visitors to read your content and increase site traffic?
• Are you okay with having a basic look of website with moderate features?
• Are your business goals solely important than the ways of creating website?

Once you have a clear idea of your needs, it comes to consider the options for creating your website.

What Are the Ways to Create a website?

• Use a DIY website builder
• Hire a web development agency or a web designer

Let’s take a closer look at each side of the coin:

What is a website builder?

A website builder is a DIY (Do-it-Yourself) tool or a user-friendly web development tool that allows a user to create a website using pre-made templates, without implementing any coding or HTML process.

 

These website builders offer a variety of different layouts, designs, and templates from which to choose from.

You can simply add widgets with easy-to-drag option to let you customize the template. Wix, Webnode, WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. are the platforms where you can create a website by yourself. 

What is a web designer?

A web designer is an IT professional who designs the layout, visual appearance and usability of a website. A good web designer has both technical as well as graphic skills.

Don’t mix up developer with designer here.

Just for a brief,

Difference between web designer and web developer-

A web developer is someone who controls turning your web design into a functioning platform, while a designer is all about web aesthetics. However, you may find someone having both skills. 

Hiring a Web Designer Vs. Using a Website Builder

Let’s take a look at the different aspects associated with website builder tools:

Pros of Using a Website Builder

1. Affordable: There are many website builder tools that offer free web services, means you can develop your website at zero investment. If you lack budget, or having a long time to invest more, website builder tools could be your best option.
2. Easy Optimization: Website builder platform offers a drag-and -drop option allowing you to easily optimize content blocks like images, text, logos, and other functions of the website. It means you don’t need to be an expert for developing a website in today’s times.
3. Built-in Tech Support: Website builders know that their customers are not web developers. That is why they have developed such a tool that allows even a high school standard kid creating a website nowadays. However, if you face any problem, there will be technical support for this.
4. Easy to install: It only takes a few clicks of your mouse to launch your website using a website builder. Just utilize drag and drop features using tools and your website go live. This smooth process saves your time a lot.

Pros of Hiring a Web Designer

Hiring a professional web designer could be a great decision depending on your budget and business goals. Developers are the master of codes and know perfectly what exactly needs to design your website into a masterpiece. So, let’s take look over benefits associated with this.

1. Design: The design of a website is like the face of a person. You know you might not be a great artist or having graphic skills to craft your website like a professional one. This is the difference. A professional web designer can give you something worthy and attractive website that will impact a great look on your customers.
2. Conversion Rates: Since, the whole idea of creating a website to turn visitors into customers, if you have a goal of selling something online. A web designer can create a great responsive website that helps to increase conversion rates. Whether you want more followers, page views, sales, or exposure in general, a professional web designer can deliver this to you.
3. Effective SEO: A website without good SEO is good for nothing. Professional web designer know how the design of website affects search engine optimization (SEO). So, by this way, they will take SEO into key focus from the very beginning.
4. Support: If you are hiring a web development agency or a professional web designer for your website development, you become their valuable customer. And, it is their reputation and quality of service that can lead to foster a long relationship with you. So ultimately, they will take care of the things associated with your website like domain configuration, security checks & updates and technical stuff. 

Cons of Hiring a Web Designer

1. Expensive: If limited budget is your problem, hiring a web designer may cost you well. A professional web designer will likely to charge considerable amount. At this point, you have to analyze your budget limitation. However it will be worth it, but eventually depend on your capacity.
2. Time Consuming: Professional web designer will take longer time to finish your website. If you have urgency to make live your website quickly, you have to keep patience in that case.
3. Ownership Rights: Some web development agencies or web designers may restrain ownership rights of your website. Make sure you read the terms & policy printed fine so that you can be assured that your website is yours when it is finished.

Cons of Using a Website Builder

1. Basic Look: While website builder tools will make it easy for you to craft a good-looking website. But your design is based on the templates offered by website builder. Your website may lack uniqueness.
2. Poor SEO: Unless your website gets indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your website is like an invisible item-it exists, but could not be found. So, creating a simple website using a website builder can result you with a poor quality SEO and consequently, it will lack organic search traffic.
3. Bothering: Despite having online tutorials to guide you on creating a website using a website builder, there will be situations where you may feel tiresome or bothering to handle everything at your own. This is because you don’t have expertise on web development. So, you should be ready to spend more time and effort than you might have expected.
4. Lack of Features: Website builder allows you do a lot, but ultimately, you are not a professional web designer who knows what features are required to make your website more appealing. Such tools offer you only basic and moderate functions.

Make Your Decision Based On Your Examined Needs

Now you have undergone various aspects associated with creating a website. So, which path is right for you- Hiring a Web Designer or Using a Website Builder?

The clear answer is- it depends on your goals and budget.

If your website is for making profits through business, and design is important to attract your customers and you have budget as well to make it happen, you should hire a professional web designer.

Going to the latter, if you lack budget and don’t have monetary goals in short-run like blogging, you can use DIY website builder.