Building Your Own Website?

It’s not for the faint-of-heart…

I love the small business owner who wants to make their own website… So courageous! And perhaps a bit shortsighted.

But then again, we all have to start somewhere.

I must admit in the early days (with one or two days of hair-pulling way back in the exciting days of 1994-1995ish when the web was oh so young and small) I thought that I could probably learn to code a website myself…

Soon though I was asking “But why should I? I don’t really like this coding part… It never looks like what my vision is”. My brain just seemed to be wired in a different way and I realized right away I needed help.. or if you will, a team to help me.

And so began my journey into the realm of team interaction to build projects for myself, clients, friends and family.

Does anyone ever really build their own website anymore really?

Take this site.. even at first simplistic overview. This humble website has taken 7 people to make it happen and get it to the current state of soft launch.

1. Creative Director & Designer & Writer (Yours truly, Blair O’Neil)
2. Another writer & editor (Judith Harlan)
3. Yet another editor, collaborator and vision holder (Jenna O’Neil)
4. System administrators (Melissa W. & Jenna)
5. IT & Server Manager (Ken Williams)
6. A project manager and Google Adwords promoter and SEO-minded individual (Stephen R.).
7. And of course the critical job of HTML coder and WordPress expert (John Schroedel).

Plus website bells and whistles – Time for research!

And even though we had the team and the vision, we still needed the right technology that fit that our needs and vision.

Enter the dreaded “Time for research” black hole.

Now we have to find, evaluate and integrate all the other software and plugins that need to installed linked and configured… Things that do email, that stop spammers, that help with SEO, that organize content, display portfolios and that are helpful for gathering information about site visitors, linking to social media and other sites… plus the various forms for questions, RFQs and Referrals. Then there are the site visitors and friends that are more than happy to give advice (thank you very much!) that allows us to evolve, have fun and still provide good value to our treasured clients.

And for lots of businesses it doesn’t stop there. You need database connections, ads, live-feed data streams, video feeds, live chat modules, e-commerce, appointment setting software integration, calendars and on and on. And it just keeps getting more and more complex as the days roll by.

I think that if you begin to total everything up you end up with a huge pool of people that are indirectly involved.. likely thousands… and we are just getting started!

So does it take a team to build a website?

Well I say “YES” if you are truly serious about the well-crafted message, the integrated design, adherence to your brand and integration with best practices for SEO.

But can you do it yourself? You bet you can. Lots of people do. It’s just that very few of them do it successfully. (But if you are a business owner why are you working on your own website instead of making sales? Do you know what your high payoff activities really are? What really brings the cash in the door? Sounds like another post in the making. For now just check out these local Reno/Sparks Sales and Business Consulting resources that might be able to help you with this… Sales Class, Sales Training Information & Consulting, Business Consulting that Actually Works!)

But if you are going to do this yourself I have one word of advice: “WordPress” (Because it will grow with you and you can grow with it. It’s not too hard, it’s a low cost item, relatively easy to deploy and gives you access to some of the best web technology on the planet… but’s that another blog post or so)

So if you think you can build a website yourself—All I can say is good luck and be sure to send me an email when you’re done.