Saturday, September 17, 2011

Is it a bad idea to design your own website?

By David Harley


If you have ever invested in a professional website design, you have experienced the sheer pleasure of letting someone who knows what they are doing, do their job. Yes, you do have to organize some information and provide them with insights about your product or services, what colors you like, and what kind of 'look' and style you want your website to have. But most importantly, you know you can leave all the HTML coding, links and Meta tags to the expert; you can let them do their job, and free up your time to do your own.

On the other hand, if you have tried to design your own website, you will no doubt have experienced the challenge of having to learn something new, and at the same time hope the end result looks professional. What you don't find out at the beginning when you design your own website is that if it isn't done properly, not only will you not get any traffic coming to your site, but when they do arrive they may not stay longer than a nanosecond. It really doesn't take any of us more than a glance to know whether a website is easy to navigate or not, and more importantly whether it's worth hanging around to find out.

One of the problems in designing your own website is the over-abundance of complicated tools. It doesn't take a non-professional too long before the website looks like it has been on caffeine for a week. Because there are such a wide variety of design features, many first time uses may try to utilize them all. The end result can be overly bright colors, strange fonts, oddly placed site navigation buttons, and distracting borders around links that may not work correctly.

An experienced website designer doesn't just know about the code and the behind the scenes activity that must be adhered to if the site is to attract traffic, they also know the details of website design and management. But even when you know the rules, such as keeping it simple, and the eye catching utilization of white space, it's still very easy to go wrong.

A website professional may make it look easy with their easy to navigate tools, links that work, pages that will download easily and fast, but it really does take specialized knowledge. A professional website designer will most likely take ongoing classes to keep up to date about latest trends and features; some are so well-learned on the subject that they may even teach classes about website design.

But the other problem with designing your own website is that things change, and when they do they change really fast. Code and protocol that worked yesterday may not work so well today. Yes they may work as far as the website looks to the outsider, but behind the scenes, where the real work in terms of improving the search engine ranking goes, design is king. And while it may look easy to get stats on your newly designed website, and provide keywords to improve search rank, there is much more to it than that. Google and yahoo look for keywords that match current protocol. It may have worked in the past to just put together a huge stream of keywords, but the latest development in search engine techniques are designed to search out websites that are well designed and have integrity. All in all it pays to find a website designer that has your best needs at heart.




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