4 Reasons DIY Web Builders Aren't Worth The Effort
DIY web builders appear to offer a complete package, but, once you look beyond the surface, there are a whole host of problems with them which mean they just aren't worth the time and effort you need to put in to get the most out of them.
Here are four issues with DIY web builders:
- Dedicated apps beat mobile sites
It's true that DIY web builders like Wix can offer the tools needed for you to optimise your site for mobile viewers. However, once you've got past the clunky and time-consuming editing of every single page of your site to make sure they all respond perfectly on mobiles and tablets, you might still find that this isn’t enough.
Apps are at the heart of digital marketing for many companies, and they offer a host of benefits a simple mobile site can’t: push and in-app notifications sent direct to the user, more personalisation and user customisation, user engagement data, the ability to use the device’s features, and adding to brand identity and presence. What’s more, research shows that people prefer using apps to mobile sites, so without an app, you're missing out. - Nice design can't hide bad content
Having a site that looks pretty is just the first hurdle to get over — DIY website builders don’t help you when it comes to content. The appearance of the site is, of course, important, particularly for a user's first impressions. But to get people to click through to your site in the first place, you need good rankings on search engines. A DIY web builder's template might look nice, but it's not going to give you the optimised content you need to get onto page one every time.
Unless you already have a team of talented copywriters at your disposal, you’re going to need to craft well-written, original copy that is engaging and grammatically correct. If you’re a business person, not a writer, this is likely be a painful and time-consuming endeavour. - Having complete control is complicated
Only a few of the DIY web builders out there allow you to design your site from scratch, and, of these, only a handful are even worth considering. Wix is possibly the best well known of the design-from-scratch builders, and it does give you a fair amount of control over the look of your site. However, this comes at a price — the user interface is often littered with buttons and boxes. This, in particular, can be very confusing for web design novices.
There is little sense to some of Wix's customisation features — you have to head to two different menus to customise the same feature, for example. Also, there are no global style options — if you change the font for one heading, you have to go through changing all the other headings individually for a cohesive look, which is needlessly time-consuming. - Monolingual in a multilingual world
In Canberra alone, over 30 languages other than English are spoken by people at home, and that’s without considering the international reach that your site might have. Our world is no longer just digital, it is truly global, and that's why it’s incredibly important to have multilingual functionality on your website.
Multilingual capability is something DIY web builders just can’t offer to any kind of standard. Weebly is one of the few that offers this capability, but only through a partner app which is messy and confusing. Voog is decent, but the other aspects of the site let it down. There is no one DIY web builder which offers all-round quality, including multilingualism, meaning you'll have to compromise somewhere if you go down this DIY route.
At Canberra Web, we can offer smart solutions to the problems of DIY builders - for example, we're dedicated to offering you a superior SEO service and provide fully integrated app development Canberra. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you.
DIY by simmons.kevin4208 licensed under Creative commons 4
