I build websites for a living, so you would expect me to tell you not to build your own. I am not going to, because for some people it is genuinely the right answer and I would rather say so.
Here is how to work out which one you are.
Build it yourself if most of this is true
- You need somewhere for people to find you, and not much more than that
- You are reasonably comfortable with a computer and do not mind fiddling
- You have a genuinely free weekend, and then another one
- You already have your words written and photographs you are happy with
- Nothing on the site needs to take bookings or payments in a complicated way
If that is you, Squarespace or Wix will do the job, it will cost you somewhere between fifteen and thirty pounds a month, and you will keep control of it. That is a perfectly sensible outcome and there is no catch.
Pay someone if most of this is true
- The site has a job to do beyond existing: bookings, payments, enquiries that arrive properly
- Your time is worth more than the money, which for most self employed people it quietly is
- You have started one before and it is still sitting there half finished
- You do not have the words written, and writing about yourself makes you want to do the washing up instead
- You need it to be findable on Google rather than just to exist
The cost nobody counts
The honest number for building your own first website is somewhere between fifteen and forty hours. Not because the software is hard, but because of the deciding. What goes on the home page. Which of these four photographs. How to describe what you do without sounding either arrogant or apologetic.
People rarely stall on the technology. They stall on the writing, every single time.
So the real question is not whether you can build a website. You can. It is whether forty hours of your life is worth more or less than the difference in price. For a plumber turning down a day of work to do it, the maths is usually clear. For someone between jobs with time and no money, it is equally clear the other way.
The half finished site problem
This is the outcome I see most, and it is worth naming.
Someone starts a Squarespace site with real enthusiasm. They get the home page looking rather good. Then they hit the About page, do not know what to write, leave it for a fortnight, and come back to find they have forgotten how any of it works. Eighteen months later there is a site with a lovely home page, a placeholder About page and no contact details.
That is worse than no website. Someone who finds it decides you are not really trading.
If you are going to build your own, block out the time properly and write all your words before you touch the builder. Write them in a plain document. Every hour spent on the words is worth three spent on the design.
What you actually give up
Being straight about the trade-offs, because the marketing never is.
Search. The builders will tell you they handle SEO. They handle the mechanical parts. They cannot decide what your pages should be about or how they should be structured, and that is most of the work.
Moving later. You cannot take a Squarespace site to another host. If you leave, you rebuild from scratch. Worth knowing at the start rather than in three years.
The specific thing. Everything you want will be almost possible. There is usually a way to do roughly what you meant, and small compromises accumulate until the site is not quite doing what you wanted.
The middle option people forget
You do not have to choose between doing all of it and none of it.
Paying someone to build it properly and then learning to make changes yourself is often the best value of the lot. You get a site that works, and you are not ringing anyone to change a price. That is how I set sites up as standard, because a site you cannot edit goes stale and a stale site stops earning.
The other middle option: get someone to write the words while you build the site. The writing is the hard part and it is the part that decides whether the thing works.
What I would say if you rang me
I would ask what you want the site to do, and roughly what your week looks like. If you told me you needed a simple presence and had time on your hands, I would tell you to do it yourself and probably point you at Squarespace.
I have had that conversation plenty of times and it has never cost me anything. People remember being told not to spend, and they come back when the thing genuinely needs doing.
If it turns out you do want it done, the prices are on the site, fixed before I start. And if you have a half built Squarespace site sitting there, bring it. Sometimes the answer is finishing it rather than starting again.