Can I Design My Own Website

Latest Articles,Web Design Dundalk
March 8, 2022
ore than 175 websites come online every minute somewhere in the world of which roughly half are built with content management systems like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Drupal and others which offer an easier path to build a website.
More and more, business owners and DIY’ers are taking to YouTube and having a go at building a website through one of many hosting providers in an effort to save on developers costs but does it really work. Can I really design a website myself and save big?, let’s have a look at a few things that might help you decide.
What’s the Sites Purpose?
Can I Do My Own SEO?
In my view, this is the hardest area of web design. Most beginners will figure out over time that there are plugins like Yoast and that alt tags and <h1> headers are important but unless your only going to do paid advertising you’ll be challenged. Challenged how? well Google uses an algorithm called Google Rank which analyses hundreds of metrics on websites to determine whether it’s worthy of ranking well (Organically) in search engine results. Metrics like appropriate keyword usage in copy content, bounce rate, backlinks, domain authority, social media integration and many many more. Don’t get me wrong, there are great self help resources like Neil Patel on Youtube and explainer videos from Yoast. But this one’s hard as it’s not a once off exercise, lots of continual analysis of things like Google Analytics to see what’s performing well over time is required. Read our related article on SEO Tips if you want to find out more. SEO takes time, in many case months before you see tangible results when it comes to organic ranking, assuming you’ve done it right.
What About eCommerce?
You can definitely do eCommerce yourself with plugins like WooCommerce and Shopify. Key points to note is that you’ll have to commit time to setting up integration (usually API keys) with Stripe, Paypal or whatever payment platform you use.
You’ll also want to take the time to categorise and tag each product so that they’re found on Google search results. Each product should have the same size image and you should fill in the fields for upsells and cross sells so as to not miss those opportunities. Many web designers work from spreadsheets (see our example here) when building eCommerce shopping carts. Once the spreadsheet is built, you can then import the spreadsheet using a woocommerce import feature for example.

Practice and time commitment! there’s a saying, that it takes “10,000 hours to become an expert at anything”, this is never more true than with web design when one considers what happens under the hood with a modern site. Again, if you’re not really looking to compete with anyone when building your own site, go for it. DIY platforms like Wix and Squarespace will let you build something that can look half decent, but there’s more to just looks as we know.
Remember that if your building a business site and you plan on competing with other players in your market, you’ll need to be continually looking at site analytics to see visitor performance, keyword performance, conversions, A/B testing for campaigns and other metrics. In otherwords measuring your efforts against sales funnel results. You’ll have to factor in budgets for PPC campaigns and social media boosted posts to really attain business tangible results as nothing is really free. A bit to consider for your venture, and of course if you need help and you’re pressed for time, talk to us at Carlton Design!