Guide to Choosing Between Website Builders or Designers
You know that you need a website for your business and you know that it's gotta be affordable and easy to manage for you. At the same time, you want to focus on your business and not on building and maintaining your website.
You have heard people talking of Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder, Weebly, SquareSpace, and how affordable and easy they are. On the other hand, there are specialized website designers to whom you can outsource the entire work and focus on your business but which could be more expensive to maintain and update. We created this blog for you to arm you with information so that you could be better prepared whether you should go for a website builder or a good website designer.
Which Is More Expensive
Website Builders - Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly have a free offering but these are not suitable for business and corporate websites. For instance, you cannot connect your own domain name and some of these have advertisements. You do get a free domain if you sign up for a longer period for a year or so. Typically, the costs of these are about US$ 22/month (annual plan) and US$ 27 and above for a monthly plan. However, you need to add the cost of learning and your time to the cost of website builders.
Website Designers - A very good set of website designers could be expensive and it is better to avoid cheaper website designers. Mid-range website designers could charge a one time fee of US$ 2000 for a corporate website. They would charge upwards of US$ 20/month for maintenance.
Which Is faster to deploy
Website Builders - can be launched almost immediately but will probably take a week to a month for you to learn, master, and launch.
Website Designers - take a longer time to understand the requirements, code and deploy. You should be prepared for at least a month to 3 months.
What is covered
Website Builders - There's a bunch of website tools, automation tools, and marketing tools that are part of the product offerings. Of course, you would need to pay for these and so your total cost could be as high as US$ 60/month.
Website Designers - This is where good website designers have a clear advantage. Website designers can create amazing content - videos, photos, and textual content which improves SEO, brand recall, and stickiness. Also, they work hard on ensuring that websites load fast. We ran GTmetrix tests on Wix websites and found that these took more than 11 seconds to load which is unacceptable performances.
Our recommendations
Website Builders - If you have an in-house graphic designer and someone who's knowledgeable about websites, SEO then it makes tremendous sense to go with website builders as you could utilize existing in-house resources as well as lower subscription cost that website builders offer.
Website Designers - Would be perfect for those who want to have a laser-like focus on their business. Moreover, this reduces considerable expenses in time, money, and learning of in-house resources.
Check out our website services offerings here