A DIY Website Can Save Thousands.. Right?
There are two ways to look at cost of a website. Sure – the amount you pay up front for the development of your site is a hard cost. That line item of $1500 or $5000 goes straight into your books and right out of your profit. Websites can be expensive to build, we hear you! With a DIY solution, you typically pay a small monthly fee to a service such as Sitebuilder or Website Tonight. Once you have signed up, then you are free to build as large or as small of a site as you wish.
I Am Captain Of My Own Ship.. now where’s the manual?
The feeling of excitement most business owners have when they take matters into their own hands usually fades the minute they load up the site builder. “What do I do now?” is usually the very next question. Unfortunately, many customers take months to figure out how to use the tool, and all the while they are paying every month for a virtual scratch pad to try out their ideas for their website. All too often, what started out as attempt to “take the bull by the horns” ends up feeling like being stuck in the streets of Madrid during the Running of the Bulls!
So How Does Website Tonight Work?
All DIY website builders, whether Website Tonight or someone else’s, provide their customers with simple templates to choose from. Typically, a customer signs up for monthly payments, picks a basic site template, chooses a logo or a slogan and then enters their content. Some site builders have nice looking templates and some don’t. One issue with the nicer looking ones is that they are often built in Flash – which is really bad from a search engine standpoint. Those sites are virtually invisible to the search engines, save for your title and meta tags. These templates are typically dated and overly simplistic, chock full of stock photography and other useless filler. In the end, you’re left to the wolves so to speak. Tech support is spotty and it’s up to you to figure out how to add, edit and manage your content pages.