You know you need a good website, so you may have leaped to Google to type in ‘cheap website design’ or ‘free website design’. If you did, you were probably faced with a ton of options from sites such as Wix and Weebly.
You may be instantly attracted to the prospect of cheap prices, and the apparently cheap design interface.
However, you should be warned; There are a few things you should be made aware of!
If you begin work with a webdesigner who uses platforms such as Wix, then be on your guard. The chances are, they aren’t very experienced at all, and will no doubt be ripping you off for design charges. Wix and Weebly were designed to make it easy for you, the business owner, to design a website. The fact that so called ‘designers’ charge you to design a website therefore seems a bit unfair.
Before I get into this, I want to point out that yes you can walk away with a pretty looking Wix/Weebly website, and you can make money from them. I know people who have used these platforms to design their websites and they get on just fine with it. However, when these businesses have come to grow, and make some additional changes they have faced a few obstacles. When you take your business seriously, it makes sense that you take the design of your website seriously, and don’t cut corners or be reeled in by cheap prices!
1. You Get What You Pay For
Wix makes it easy to design a website. Fact. But the truth is, it shouldnt be easy! A website is complex, and there’s a reason why there is so much hype about the importance of SEO, content structures, optimising conversions, customer journeys, copywriting, google analytics etc.
If you’re not a website designer, chances are you won’t know about any of these things, which means building an apparently free or cheap website may actually be costing you money.
You can’t expect something for nothing, so If you’re not prepared to spend money on a custom website, then don’t expect your website to have all the great functionalities that custom websites have. If you take your SEO seriously, then you’ve got to be willing to invest in it.
2. No Goal Optimisation
Your website is the first impression people get of your business, and so it must be tailored to you and what your business offers.
Because each business is different, the journey a customer makes on your website will be different too. When I work with clients, I make sure I understand who the customer is, and where they are likely to convert to a paying customer. With Wix & Weebly sites, you get very limited options of how to edit this process, and so it will be difficult to create a website which supports your customers’ natural journey.
3. Lack of SEO
Whilst cheap website builders offer standard SEO tools and editing options, they aren’t good for businesses who are serious about getting their site showing on the top rankings. The options and targeting are limited, and aren’t even close to comparing to the optimisation options on WordPress!
The drag and drop feature is great for hiding the complex backend of code, but this makes your keywords get lost in the layers and layers of code, meaning that Google’s search bots will have a hard time locating the keywords you’re wanting to rank for! All this decreases your chances of showing at the top of the rankings in search engines.
4. Fancy A Change? Tough Luck.
With WordPress, you have the option to create backups, or to save your content so if you are re-branding, or simply redesigning your website then it’s easy to keep/copy your content.
With Wix/Weebly, there is no option to do this; you simply have to start from scratch! If, down the line, you want to add in some extra features, and Wix/Weebly doesn’t support this, then you can’t transfer your content to another platform. This makes for a very costly and time consuming change.
5. Lack Of Support
I’ve heard no end of complaints from users of Weebly about the lack of support from the team at HQ. If there’s one thing I love about WordPress, is the HUGE network of support forums there are for getting help – no matter what you want to do, guaranteed you will be able to find someone who can help you! The official support team are also fab, and have always repsonded back to me within a matter of minutes.
I like to think of myself as a professional website designer. I use WordPress, and most websites I design are started from scratch (with the exeption of Shopify ecommerce websites). I get to know my clients, the goals they want to achieve, how they want to receive sales and I get to know their business model and brand. I have some knowledge of coding, as well as SEO, and by working with specialists I can make sure your site is completely tailored to you. Like I said earlier, if you’re wanting to take your business seriously, then you should take your website seriously!
If you have any questions about this blog, or you’re interested in making the change from your Wix/Weebly website to a multi-functioning WordPress site, get in touch by emailing me at alice@aliceroseandco.co.uk.
For general enquiries, or you’re interested in getting started with a new website, send an email to info@aliceroseandco.co.uk or use our contact page here.
