On Easy Web Design

These days, it’s piss easy to get a website made. It’s in fact piss easy to make a website yourself. Without even paying any money. There is a multitude of free shit out there that does all the hard work for you, throwing a bunch of templates at your face and letting you customize the colours and all that. Most of these website builders just have pre-built templates and you enter the text and images yourself in predetermined locations. In fact, the more you look at it, the more you realise that ‘designing’ a website is in fact really easy.

It’s also often really cheap too. These days, pretty much every single website builder will give you a free trial, and most of the major domain registrars also have a website builder service. They sell you a domain name and then let you put a website on said domain name. You have to be careful though because there may be additional costs. Sure, the website builder might be free for a period, or it might be permanently free. But you have to pay yearly for your domain name and you’ll often have to pay for hosting too. If you want an email, that may or may not be included in the price.

Of course, it all depends on who you decide to build your website with. And sure, you’ll be able to make your website look however you want, based on their templates. If you want more though, that might cost you. Not always money, but time and effort as well. Not every website builder is as flexible as getting someone to build you what you want. You can’t have exactly what you want, you have to mess around and twist things in ways that maybe they shouldn’t. You might even have to… write some of your own code… Which kinda defeats the point.

And not every website builder is easy to use. I’ve actually tried a few website builders and found them almost as tedious as writing HTML myself. No two website builders are the same and you often find yourself clicking around to change simple things, or, worst case scenario, having to contact support and get them to help you.

Sometimes it’s just better to let someone else design what YOU want, rather than messing around inside a website builder. That way you get what you want, using something that’s built to do what you want. And you can leave the hard work and the updating and all that to whoever is building your website. Will it be cheaper? Probably not, but you pay for what you get. Then again, since you have to pay for domain names and hosting and some website builders charge monthly, it might end up cheaper getting a professional to build your website in the long run.

Actually you can just pay someone to do everything for you. It’s not cheaper but it’s often less stressful.

There’s another, bigger issue though. If you use a website builder, is it really your own website? No. It’s not. It’s often just software that you are renting from a company. Software hosted on said company’s servers. Software which the company may change at any time.

Okay, sure, most companies keep backups of things. But you can rarely take those backups and put them somewhere else. And I dislike that. You pay towards your website’s existence but should the website builder you are using go away, or should you want to take your website elsewhere, you might not be able to. When I build a website for someone, I make sure that they can take their website (or a backup of it or whatever) and use it however they want. If a client decides they want to move away, I can give them a copy of their website and they can go and host it wherever they want. Any website I make, it belongs to the person who I made it for because they paid me to build it for them.

Domain names and hosting are secondary and separate costs, separate from the purchasing of a website.

You often don’t get that with a basic website builder. Because you’re paying to use a service to make a thing, you’re often not actually paying for the thing itself.

Actually, you don’t get that with a lot of things. As is the way with services and products…