The idea that everyone can create a cheap, easy, instant business solution such as a website sounds too good to be true, and that’s because it is.
There are tons of self-build site providers out there, and it’s tempting to think that designing and building your own website is a cheap and easy alternative to a professional doing it for you, however, the reality of a self-built site is often far from perfect.

An essential 21st-century business website needs to not only look professional, but be Search Engine Optimised (SEO) to rank highly in Google search results, be easy to navigate, and ultimately make you money.
Here are Castle’s top reasons why a DIY build just isn’t worth doing if you are a professional business whose aim is to make money, raise awareness, or promote yourself on the interweb:

Money
Nothing in life is free, and that includes your time, the time in personally building and maintaining a site comes at an indirect cost to you and your business, isn’t there something more profitable you could be spending your time doing?

A lot of self-build website providers advertise either free or low-cost services, but this very rarely holds true, a ‘freebie’ sometimes means you start with a trial before accruing hefty monthly charges, and if not, your site may be splattered with hideous banners or pop-ups endorsing the provider’s services, unless of course, you agree to upgrade to a more expensive hosting package.

In addition, you will often run into hidden cost territory, for instance, if you want to add an app or plug-ins, with additional features likely to be charged at an enhanced rate, with hosting and domain registration incurring an extra cost each and every per month on top of the standard website fees.

You may think you are saving money initially but in reality, you are just offsetting.

Looks are everything
You’ve heard the expression, first impressions are important, well in this game, they are even more so. For prospective clients to view you as trustworthy, it is vital that the look and ‘feel of your site expresses credibility as a business professional.

Sites that are designed and created with a one-size-fits-all template, means self-built websites often look amateurish in comparison, are difficult to navigate, and are identical in appearance to thousands upon thousands of sites that are utilising the identical template.

With incredibly limited options for enhancement and customisation, your identically-templated website will fail at the first test: do you stand out from your competition? If you don’t, what’s the point?

Professional Performance
Simply put, DIY websites contain serious design flaws that will, in time, affect performance and end up impeding you in the long run, they just don’t work.

Self-built sites have little or no capability when it comes to SEO effectively rendering your business invisible to customers. Even if your site does have some tools to help you optimise it for search engines unless you have a working knowledge of what SEO is, how to promote it and how to get it working to your advantage (which is a difficult and time-consuming process) it will be useless.

In addition to this, sites with shared hosting and which is industry standard for DIY website providers, are more often than not beleaguered by slow page loading times, with the effect that potential customers will leave your website, frustrated with the poor user experience.

According to research carried out by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly 50% of site users expected a page to load in 2 seconds or less, I’ll just leave that there.
They will abandon a page/site that hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds.

79% of online shoppers who reported trouble with site performance said they won’t return to the site to buy again and approximately 44% of people would tell a friend that they had had a poor experience.

Maintenance and Backup
Not surprisingly, any maintenance or backup support you can expect when you choose a self-build option is more often than not, absent.

Site support is almost never included so that when you experience a problem with your site and inevitably you will, it will cost you, pecuniary or with taking up significant amounts of your valuable time as you trawl through tedious and baffling online FAQs and tutorials.

On top of this, you won’t receive a personal service, in many scenarios you can anticipate help coming from an international call centre, which means long queues for any fixes or site changes to be carried out with the same result, time and money wasted.

Time is Money
Quality sites take time to design and build. At Castle the first thing we do is learn about your business, your website is an incredibly important financial investment, and it requires time and effort spent to make it look the way you want and to perform and function to its maximum.

However, this doesn’t mean that you will be spending hour after hour, day after day, working on your site. After an initial meeting Castle provides you with a site that has a responsive design, meaning your sites will now match any screen size, SEO optimisation with connection to analytics, so you can check how your site is performing, opensource future-proofing as all sites are developed using either. PHP or .NET, to allow your site the flexibility you may need in the future. In addition, we can build for you a portal, forums, entire CMS systems, booking application packages, apps, or an entire eCommerce store. Our sites also have third party integration which means they are compatible with thousands of plugins across the world, connecting any major online merchant system, stock management system and other selling tools to your site, and all of this with affordable hosting, backed up and secured using our own servers, with dedicated UK customer support.

Self-builds are a great idea but incredibly inefficient. So instead of wasting your valuable time, effort, and money on building your own website, these things can be much better spent doing what you do best – running your business.

Know-How
When all’s said and done, building a website that is going to make you money, requires a huge skill set, and in reality, you can’t become an expert in everything that’s needed. So, when it comes to your business website, your strategic marketing tool, it pays to go to the professionals who can provide the necessary know-how, insight and experience and offer professional blueprints, skilled guidance, face-to-face meetings, with full control of your own content, and most importantly, produce a high-quality website that generates enough return-on-investment traffic, to pay for itself.