Pay a developer or build your own?

For all us newbies starting on this exciting world of internet marketing and info-products, a website is an absolute must.

This is a question for Niki, and I am sure many others will have the same question.

With wanting to start off with as low a capital as possible, do you recommend we pay to get a website built or build our own?

I would like to build my own? What do you recommend as the best site to build on?

Is it difficult to add on bolt ons such as auto responder etc. or do you need to be experienced in Java to do the likes of this.

Finally do you recommend focusing on direct response websites first or a home page?

This might help a lot of us out.

Sean 

Hi Sean,

Great question...

In terms of getting started (even with low capital) my advice is usually to have a site built for you by a web-developer you trust - unless you already happen to have decent web design / development skills...

Most web developers charge about £35 per hour - and if you pick a good one - they should have the ability to achieve in minutes or hours what would take days for someone trying to pick up the technology from scratch.

In most cases – not having a website is not a barrier to getting paid – so I’d rather see our clients focusing on earning money using their core talents, rather than struggling to develop a new skill-set that doesn’t necessarily play to their natural strengths.

For example if you’re, say, a life coach, and you can charge £40 per hour, it makes more sense to focus on finding new clients and billing existing ones - and to give the cash directly to a web developer - rather than to struggle for 5 or 10 hours infront of the PC and ending up with an inferior or amateurish result.

However, there are shortcuts you can take to smooth the process...

Firstly, you can save a great deal of stress and heart-ache by knowing exactly what you want the finished product to look like, and you can figure this out by studying (and copying) other websites which have a structure that works.

For example, if you check out any of our newer sites, e.g. www.inspired-entrepreneur.com you’ll see that they all follow a similar structure... This structure is something we talk about at length on our infoproducts course, but some of the main elements that make this a great structure are –

• Compelling headline.
• Attention grabbing body copy.
• A great freebie (in our case, a free multimedia e-course called Discover The Work You Were Born To Do) that people can sign-up for in exchange for their e-mail address.
  

... you can save yourself a great deal of trail and error by instructing your developer to follow a layout similar to this. In your mentorship sessions we can obviously help you with this...

Then there’s the “look and feel” of the design itself (colours, fonts, images).

Again, it’s possible to spend days going back and forth with a graphic designer trying to arrive at something you’re happy with, but you can save yourself lots of toing and frowing by giving them a tangible starting point.

I find it useful to leaf through a couple of hundred professional designs at template libraries such as –

• www.templateworld.com
• www.templatemonster.com

... if you find one you love – great – you can buy it for ~$50 and have it adapted / modified, or you can instruct your designer to combine elements from a bunch of different designs.

Then there are the various tools like Site Build It (www.sitesell.com) – or even the increasingly popular idea of building your website on top of a blog (e.g. www.typepad.com).

I think that these services are fine as far as they go (and they can be great as a way to get started quickly) but be aware that if you use an off-the-shelf service for your primary website you’ll always loose a certain amount of flexibility... For example, it’s possible to end up in a cul-de-sack when certain features you need simply aren’t offered.

... so make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, and make sure that any service you use is going to fit the bill. We can obviously help you with this in your one-on-one sessions.

Actually, autoresponders are a case in point...

You can get this kind of service cheaply and easily from the likes of –

• www.aweber.com
• www.getresponse.com

... and a web developer could integrate the autoresponder service with your website in about an hour or so (it’s a fairly straight forward process – the service providers give you detailed instructions – and you don’t need programming skills like Java).

... however, if you’ve chosen an off-the-shelf solution (as opposed to building something from scratch) – it might not necessarily be so easy...

Also there’s the problem of finding decent web developers / designers. I was thinking about creating a “reviews” section in the forums so that people could post their experiences with various providers. Would anyone be interested in this kind of thing?

Hope this helps and obviously - as one of our mentorship clients - I can chat with you about these choices one-on-one when the time is right.

Thanks,

Niki

Great reply Niki.

As a newbie to Inspired Entrepreneur I have only now read the post.

I built my own site using MicrosoftFrontpage which I found fairly easy to use.  The problem I have is I have a site which I am told is unconventional!!  Whether this is good or bad I cannot say but would be interested in any comments from the experts here.  See http://www.MrGiggles.co.uk

One possible mistake I did make was to host my site on a free IPS.  This worked great to begin with and then they changed their policy on hosting business sites for free.  This means that I have had to change from www.users.tinyworld/giggles/ to www.MrGiggles.co.uk which on reflection I should have done at the beginning.  I am now in the process of rebuilding my credibility with the search engines and my visits have fallen from around 400 hits a day to around 20.

This is unlikely to hurt my business in the long term but it is annoying.

I hope by mentioning my mistake this will stop others from falling to the same trap.

Gordon

Hi Niki,

Thank you very much for all the useful info in this post.  It’s very helpful as I am deciding whether to create a new business website myself or pay an agency to do it for me.

One thing you say is that ‘it may not be so easy to integrate an auto-responder into an off-the-shelf solution’, are you implying that you can’t integrate an auto-responder into Site Build It?  From looking at their site they say you can.  Not sure which is right please?

I’d be very interested in your idea of having a review section.  Many thanks to Claire Gillen for her review of Site Build It on her website.  

In the meantime, can you recommend any books on website development, SEO and marketing please?  I help small businesses with their traditional marketing and I’d like to increase my knowledge of web design and internet marketing to extend the range of services I offer my clients, so this is an educational process for me.

I was looking at the following examples on Amazon and wondered what you’d recommend?

Get to the Top on Google - David Viney

Internet Marketing: How to Get a Website That Works for Your Business - Nigel Packer

Small Business Websites That Work - Sean McManus

Website Essentials: A Guide to Planning, Designing and Managing Your Website - Philip Thompson

Many thanks,

Lisa

Hi all - some great comments.

My vote goes for getting it built by an agency - although I have been lucky to find a local freelance web builder that is superb and excellent value for money - he charges just £70 per page - so I got my entire site built for £500. It is also just in HTML (no Flash or too many images) so it is very visible to the Search Engines.  www.expertlearning.co.uk 

Inserting an autoresponder form was relatively painless. I just generated the HTML for the form on the GetResponse.com site and then sent it to the web developer who put it in the right place. GetResponse also have some pretty good video tutorials. And have been very responsive when I have asked questions.

There are better things to be doing with your time ! - like writing great copy, materials and promoting your business.......

Michael

Hi Lisa,

My pleasure :o)

... the comment about the autoresponder was a general one - when you buy an off the shelf product you'll often customise everything through an interface that they provide for you - which may (or may not) give you the flexibility you need. But, I'm pretty sure that Site Build It does allow you to integrate autoresponders, but I've never used it myself...

Sure -

• For AdWords and PPC I recommend the Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall.
• For SEO, a brilliant primer is SEO Book by Aaron Wall, and there's also Search Engine Optimisation for Dummies.
• I have Stomping the Search Engines 2 DVD course in the post right now – so I’ll let you know what I think of that.

... for website development, I agree with Michael, and tend to advise clients to get a professional. Having worked in the industry myself, I always struggle to find good web developers to recommend, but I recently met a guy called Tony at Hype London who seems to know his stuff. If anyone would like to review a web designer or developer, you can do so here.

I've tended to pick-up my internet marketing knowledge from online courses / infoproducts and live training rather that print books, and I've yet to come across a really good book that gives you a primer on internet marketing as a whole. Most of my print books are on sales and copywriting, so I could probably throw out some good recommendations there if you like..

For general marketing I recommend everything by Seth Godin - he's by far and away my favourite marketing author.  

Hope this helps a bit :o)

Niki

Great comments from everyone but I thought I'd add my thoughts to this discussion as well. If technology isn't your strong point, I definately would recommend you hire someone else to do it. Not that you shouldn't learn some of what it takes to build a site but too often we can get so caught up in learning more about our weaknesses rather then focusing on our strengths.  I find myself doing that all the time.  A website can actually be set up rather quickly and easily using the open source program such as Wordpress or even Joomla which has a bit more of a learning curve on how the backend workd  but there are tons of templates available for those two programs online where you can tweak them to your own liking and website goals and add your own graphics as well.  You can make a very professional site from these free resources.

Blessings,

Lori

Lisa

If you're serious about internet marketing, the Thirty Day Challenge is for you. It's brillilant, fun to do and it's a free step by step course run by some of the best people in the business. It takes some commitment but it's truly fantastic. Start from the preseason and work your way through it. Don'tworry if you can't do it everyday, just make sure you download all the videos and info and keep going. You'll not regret it!

www.thirtydaychallenge.com

Good luck!

Claire

www.clairefindlater.com

Claire (Findlater)

Thank you for recommending the 30 day challenge on your last post! www.thirtydaychallenge.com

The information these guy provide for free in their videos is quite incredible!

If you are seriously interested in optimising your site, driving traffic to it and understanding all those internet marketing tools, terms and websites you have heard about but somehow didn't quite understand - then spend time sitting through these YouTube videos!

Yes you will have to dedicate 30 mins or so every day for thrity days ( plus do some stuff) - but you will learn so much.

I am only on day 3 - but it has already explained a lot and sparked off a lot of ideas.

Thanks again

Michael

I build all my web sites myself but I realise that everybody on the Internet cannot do it themselves. I recently wrote a small eBook where I explain how one can easily create your own web site. It is much easier than Joomla, etc. This is for a very basic web site but it is a good place to start. The free eBook can be downloaded from http://www.passive-income.co.za/free and the online web builder I refer my readers to is at http://www.weebly.com

Hope this helps

hi there everyone

i am in the IT Industry for over 14 years and i think personally

that if you want you can build up your own website, but from experiance i would go that route

i had started out learning everything so i went in doing everyting on my own, and i wasted way too much time getting everything as i had planned.

for those that have the caital i would reccomend getting the site built by thos e that specialise in web design while you can focus your energy on marketing and other details in the business.

Regards

Junaid