You need a website!” How many times have you heard that one? How often have you said, “Okay, I’ll make it myself.” Then you tried it, and you quit because it’s never as simple as it seems. Here’s a bit about some of the most popular DIY options and why they may fall short for your business’s needs.
1. It’s Not All Colors and Words
Designing a website is about more than just colors and words.
You might have spent weeks, months, or even years planning and developing your brand image. You’ve got the business cards, the social media pages, the logos, the taglines, the fonts, colors, and style all ironed out. You love the look and are told you can just insert that into your website.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Web design doesn’t just happen with nice colors and eye-catching fonts. Instead, it’s about coding, functionality, navigability, scalability, and creating an effortless and intuitive user experience. Simple web builders won’t give you the tools needed to achieve these more complex aspects of web design.
2. Drag-and-Drop Doesn’t Work
“No coding required.” “Create a high-quality website at the click of a button.” “Our easy-to-use tools and templates make web design a breeze.” These are just some of the promises website builder tools give you. They tell you that their drag-and-drop tools will allow you to create a unique, beautiful website with all the functionality of a professionally built one. It’s not true.
Drag-and-drop tools don’t work. Why? Because they are highly restrictive. In eliminating the need for coding, these tools give you a minimal scope for fonts, colors, templates, and the shape of navigation buttons, headers, and footers. Even the placement of “elements” on a web page is locked into a defined area and cannot be easily expanded, changed, or minimized.
These “simple” tools don’t make web design easy because they create more restrictions on creativity. Moreover, for business websites, these “simple” tools often pose functional problems that may require more coding to fix than if a professional had built it from scratch.
3. Desktop? Mobile? Desktop?
Here’s another difficult thing about designing websites–when you create a website meant for a desktop display, it may look perfect. But try opening that website up on mobile, and if you didn’t design a mobile version of the site, you’d get a jumbled mess on the screen.
Again, web builder tools say you can design your website for both mobile and desktop views. But, it’s often the case that when you edit one version for one reason, the other one must be edited for another reason, meaning twice as much work. Or, the web tool will create a mobile edition of the site that is even more stylistically and functionally restrictive than the desktop version.
4. Functionality and Navigability
Designing a beautiful and high-quality website requires a focus on functionality and navigability. You’re not painting a picture or making a scrapbook. This is a website, and that means it must be usable.
Make-it-yourself web design tools offer you only the most basic “elements” for navigation and functionality. They let you make “buttons” and add new pages; you can add search bars. But you can’t define what these elements look like, how they work, or what results appear, which often makes them less intuitive. The minute someone inputs something into that search bar, the results make it clear you used a template.
Professionally designed websites include code just for navigation and function so that everything works as it should and it looks as amazing as the rest of the site.
5. Websites are More than Coding and Raw Data
Let’s say you create a website with basic coding skills instead of a drag-and-drop web builder. Even here, designing a good website is harder than it looks. This is because websites are more than just code and raw data.
Of course, you can code everything so that it functions correctly and all the correct data appears. But good websites also need graphics, high-quality photos that load correctly and promptly, and visual consistency across pages. Achieving these things takes more time and effort than you might think.
6. It Must Be Scalable
Lastly, good websites must be scalable. Coding from scratch without experience or using a drag-and-drop web builder tool might allow you to design a nice-looking web page, but the minute you need to add a new page, you might have to work practically from scratch all over again.
As your business or project grows, you need your website to grow with it, and consistently so. Building a scalable website is hard, but the pros have the experience, tools, and knowledge required to make it happen.
We Design Websites So You Don’t Have To
Are you looking for a web design company that can build you a fantastic website? Don’t want to tackle this job by yourself? Matcha Design offers web design and development services for clients that want their website to stand out, reach the first page in search engines, and display their unique branding with the functionality they require. Contact us today to see how we can help!
