You’ve set up your business, and know you need to get online…should you be the one to set up your company website? Yes. But also, maybe no. Whether you should be following the yellow-brick design road, or using ruby slippers to call in the experts depends on several factors, and you should figure out what you need from it before you make your decision.

Should you go it alone? We’ve looked at the pros and cons. 

Using Website Builders for your Company Website

Whilst you might expect we at Anthem Communications – designers of websites – would be waving the flag of having someone do it for you, we know that this isn’t always the right choice for everyone.

Thankfully, there are plenty of website builders and templates out there, from Squarespace to Wix and hundreds in between. They’ve been revolutionary in getting small businesses online quickly with a basic website, without needing to invest too much time, letting you get back to what you do best. The tech-confident among us can find a healthy foundation within these. 

If you want some opinions from other small business folks on Squarespace versus Wix, read this Reddit thread or this thread.

That all said, it’s admittedly not quite so easy as waving a magic wand and watching the sales come in. If you’re not entirely comfortable with the world of fonts, layout, color contrasts, and imagery, you may be at a disadvantage in making it represent your brand. Furthermore, one of the pitfalls of the DIY builders is that their platforms are closed, not open source like WordPress and other more professional-level content management systems. This means less flexibility with plugins. For example, WordPress boasts over 60,000 different community-developed plugins, while Squarespace has around 150.

That’s not to say it’s impossible by any means – there are some incredible home designed websites that do amazing things, without an expert in sight! – but that making it stand out amongst a sea of websites using the same templates isn’t everyone’s cup of coffee, and sometimes it’s worth calling in the barista. 

(If you do decide to build your own site, check out our guide on picking the perfect domain name!)

Using Your Company Website for Your Own Voice

You know your company best, and that means you know all the stories that bring it heart, the pieces that are more important than others, the already bestselling products vs those that could use a little extra love. Small businesses are often about people, and you could be the best person to champion yourself and your stories.

Who better to build a website to represent your company than you who lives it?

Equally, you’ll have to be careful not to be too close to the project. Have you ever seen an episode of Shark Tank, where an entrepreneur had a fantastic product, but absolutely failed to justify to the sharks why it deserved their time and investment? 

The sharks would want to hear something specific, but the entrepreneur was too excited in telling them something else. It’s actually really common, and you have to be careful in making it appeal to your potential customers, rather than being entirely about the business itself.

It’s a delicate balance, that sometimes you need a second set of well versed, external eyes to be able to see it differently with!

Be Aware of the Time Commitment

If you’re comfortable with website basics and have a drive to understand what makes them tick so to make your website the best it can be, you should absolutely have a try at creating your own.

If it goes well, it can be not just fun, but save you time, and give you an understanding of how to maintain it in future. 

Just be aware that there are some traps you can fall into – anything from optimizing your page for different size screens, to how your URL Slugs are formatted, to whether you’re being indexed on google at all, all before considering SEO (what’s that?) on the page itself, and all before considering how frequently requirements for websites to be considered healthy change.

It can be a job in itself.

Sometimes having a professional build it, and with the potential for some shortcuts that save you from normalizing a manual process later, can save you more time further down the line. 

Importantly too, building from scratch is easier than fixing inbuilt errors, and so if you later need a little help, that same user-friendliness of the website builder is the stuff of nightmares for website developers.

Handing it off to a professional later on might sound like a good option, but it’ll come at the cost of more time and money, making it more than having it built from the start. 

So, should you design your own company website?

If you’ve got the means, the drive, and the right can-do attitude, then building your company website yourself might be the way to go. Just do your research, keep on top of changes, and seek outside opinions where you can.

However, if investing significant amounts of time into web development doesn’t sound like the dream you set your small business up with, sometimes getting a professional to get it right the first time will save you both time and money. That’s where we come in!