Websites can be expensive if you hire an agency to make them, so you wonder if it would be feasible if you could build your own website. Would it be easy? How long would it take? Could it be good enough?
Based on my 6+ years of website building experience, I can tell you that the difficulty depends on the type of website you want.
It’s quite easy and doable to create your own website if what you’re doing is putting content into established layouts/themes with website builders like Squarespace, but if you want something more custom and exactly how you want it takes time to learn. the platforms and technologies needed to do so.
Using Website Builders
If you’re building your own websites, you’ll most likely use a website builder. web instead of learning to code it with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. However, with those website builders come limitations.
For example, one limitation with Squarespace is that you can’t easily add sliders. Sliders are something a lot of people love, but if you want to build your own website with no experience, it’s not something you can easily implement without knowing a bit about coding.
Varies across website platforms , here are some more examples of features you couldn’t add without programming/web development experience:
- Make the website look exactly the way you want it to
- Sliders and carousels
- Popup image galleries
- Custom popups
- Complex layouts
- Complex web forms (such as step-based or logical) -based)
- Custom Checkout Page Features
- Tons of ecommerce features like add-ons at checkout, X for X offers (like 5 for 10), pricing based on number of items in cart, bundle discounts, non-core coupons, free shipping or based on location and more
- Non-basic animations
- Various types of widgets (calculators, “share this”, print functions, data visualization, quizzes, anything interactive)
- Content specifically for mobile devices
- Custom CMS features (such as adding user-friendly interfaces for frequently added content)
- And many, many, more .
Besides all those limitations, there is one part that people always leave out when it comes to creating a website on their own, and that’s good, it really will be.
I personally have been doing web design/development for over 6 years now, and I feel like I’ve only just begun to break the surface. Not just in terms of different web technologies and programming languages (because they will always change and require constant learning), but purely in terms of website design like:
- What website elements are and what are not effective
- What really makes a good website
- Conversion optimizations
- Good design
- Accessibility and meeting people’s design expectations
- User Experience (great topic!)
So yeah, building a basic informational website can be quite easy, but once you start trying to make the website what you specifically want while the website is still effective and polished, that’s where it becomes hard to do.
You may be able to make a website, but will it be good? Will you understand the point you are trying to get across to users? Is your website good enough for users to convert into sales/leads? This takes time and experience to learn and master.
How long does it take to create a website?
This depends on the method you use to create your website.
Yes Go with Squarespace , you could learn the platform after 2-5 days of playing with it. Within that time, you’ll quickly see your limitations and what you can actually do. But building the website can take you anywhere from 3 to 10 days to set everything up and add the content, even allowing for a learning curve.
If you dared to want to learn to code yourself, it could take you 3 to 6 months to learn and be good at HTML and CSS, and even longer if you wanted to learn JavaScript (which isn’t used much for information-based websites). From a business decision perspective, I would not recommend coding it as it would take too long to learn and configure. From a personal growth perspective, coding can be a really fun hobby and skill if you want to learn it.
If your website is done by a professional agency (who has experience), it can do about 10 – 35 days considering the planning and methodology that would be carried out. They are most likely hand coding their website or using WordPress to do so, which will also factor into how long it takes. The reason why professionals take longer to do it is that behind it will be a planning, a methodology and personalized designs.
You will find that whether you go with an agency or do it yourself, the really time consuming factor in building a website is how quickly you source and create your website content. </p
After being on the receiving end of many different clients, I have seen content on a single web page delay the launch of the website by 2 weeks. Not to mention, when content is added later in the development cycle, it can take even longer than if the content was provided early in development for a number of different reasons. So make sure you get as much content upfront as possible so development goes as fast as possible.
Is it hard to build a website from scratch?
Making a website Starting from scratch requires an unusual set of skills. Usually, when it comes to creating a website, professionals usually branch out on the design aspect or the development aspect. It’s rare for professionals to excel at both, as design is typically more creatively oriented and programming more analytically oriented.
So if you choose to build a website alone from scratch, you’ll have to do and be able to do double the work.
Making a website from scratch involves many different skills. Skills, which if one is left behind, will have a noticeable impact on your website. Building your website from scratch would imply:
- Learning 3 programming languages
- Learning web design and user experience (planning and final presentation)
- Learn photography editor basics (like Photoshop)
- Some server stuff (like hosting your website, FTP, SSL)
The 3 fundamental languages that are used to build websites are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you wanted to build your website from scratch, you would have to learn HTML, CSS, and most likely JavaScript to get anywhere.
HTML and CSS seem like fairly easy programming languages to learn, but they are very deep, so it takes a lot of time to master.
After you get good at programming, you’ll need to learn some design. You will most likely need to structure your website to begin the design process.
Then after your wireframes, (if you want it to be good) make a refined design and finished in high resolution. of the website in Photoshop before finally coding it.
Overall, I’d say it’s hard to make a website from scratch, not to mention time consuming. You know, are there full degrees for this kind of thing?
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