It's easy to build a website and throw it into the online stratosphere! Long gone are the days where you would have to hand-code everything yourself, set up a server in the spare bedroom and be constantly fighting away the threat of a cyber attack. No, today you can pay £1.99 a month and build it using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). But is that really the way forward if companies want to succeed online?
In this blog we'll be looking at the Pros and Cons of DIY website and Agency built websites.
First of all, let me show you how MooMooSheep build websites.
We'll come meet you, buy you a coffee and discuss, in detail, the goal of your website and it's target audience. Whether you want more people to buy online, sign up to a newsletter or both.
We pick out the best coding language for your site, which platform (if any) we use, and how the site is going to be structured (a sitemap).
Using modern design techniques is key at this stage. There's no point in us building a website that feels like it's from the 90's. All of the team at MooMooSheep have regular training on new and current design trends. We also focus on User Experience (UX) and the User Interface (UI) as well as the psychology of web design and colours. Then we build a wireframe model of your site, like a blueprint.
Although a lot of our customers want to include their own content on the website, we will often optimise it for ease of reading for the users and also for search engines.
It's now time to take all the aspects of the site and develop it into code, making sure that everything is optimised so it loads quickly and coded correctly.
We test every single little aspect of the website; from proofreading to code debugging. We run tests to make sure it works across all major browsers and is responsive (optimised for mobile and tablet devices). We then go back to the analysis and double check we've done everything according to plan.
Once we're ready to launch, we'll run over our final check list and make sure everything is as it should be. Then we monitor it, making the occasional tweak and making sure it's working properly. We can also manage the future maintenance of the site for you.
This is obviously a simplified version of our entire checklist but 90% of you reading this will have learnt something new about web design.
These pay-monthly-websites are a fantastic way to test the water, costing little, or nothing, to get something out there. But it's definitely not a long term fix! DIY websites usually have massive restrictions on what you can do, designed poorly and sometimes not even responsive.
Eventually, you'll want a website that is better than your competitors and that shows some real results, when you are ready to take the next step, get in touch and we'd be happy to help.