Why We Are Better than the $600 Website Folks

We have been asked about this a number of times. Fortunately (for us) some of our clients went that route before coming to us, so we have a pretty good idea what the pros and cons are.

There are a couple of types of "quick and dirty" website builders. One group builds traditional websites in a more-or-less traditional way. The other group lets the site owner build the site using proprietary software that offers templates for the basic site design. Let's look at both of them.

Traditional

The "traditional" folks start your site "design" by going to their library of site designs, picking one that looks reasonable, making a few changes, and the site design is done. For $600, they can't afford to customize it by sitting down with you to find out what you like, what you don't like, what your business philosophy is, or how your business works.

Why is that important? Here's why: The web has become the equivalent of the yellow pages, company brochures, and store windows, all rolled into one medium. It's where many of your potential customers first meet you and your company. And even in this electronic age, it's still true that you have only one chance to make a first impression. Do you want that first impression to be created by someone who knows nothing about you, using a library of recycled designs?

Build-it Yourself

The "build-it-yourself" folks let you design your own site. Well, not from scratch. You create the design from their library of design templates. Once you select a template, you're on your own -- the content is all your responsibility. The problem is that some of us are designers and some of us are not, and the results reflect that. Again, we're talking about first impressions here.

For some reason, many lawyers like to do their own websites, perhaps encouraged by articles in the various law journals. When we encounter this, our approach has always been to ask what their chargeout rate is for their legal services. The answer is usually somewhat north of $150 (often far north of that figure). We then point out that, since they are professional lawyers and not professional web developers, they are paying $150+/hour for unskilled labor.

However, that's not the end of the problems. Many of the sites that offer low-cost websites require that you host your site with them. There are two reasons for this: (1) they make money off the hosting charges for as long as your site is with them; and (2) because they use proprietary software to build the site rather than more common authoring tools, the site code is not compatible with traditional hosting services.

If you ever want to move the site to another hosting service, you have an interesting challenge. Usually there is no way to go to the site via the back-end and simply grab the files the way you can with a traditional site. There are no HTML files to grab, since the site resides in some database driven by their software, and they don't offer a back way to access what files do exist (like the graphics).

There is a solution, but it costs: Since the proprietary software has to produce HTML so browsers can see the site, a skilled web developer can copy the code and images that are sent to the browser and then re-arrange the files to work properly in a traditional hosting service. There is a fair amount of work deep in the code, changing links to images and removing extraneous garbage, but we have done it. And fortunately, once the site is converted, you can move it or change it like any other site.

But when you add up the cost of the site builder's fee, the cost of your time, and the cost for a web developer to download and convert your site, you'll find you've paid close to the cost of having us build you a site from scratch and the result will be less than satisfying. We think you're better off starting with us -- you'll get a better site, it will be easily transportable, and it will make a great first impression.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.