Pros and Cons of Hiring a Web Designer Vs. Building Your Own Website

Unlike the 80s or 90s, building a website is not a million-dollar affair. Of course, having a good one can be an important pillar of your digital identity, but things have become so simpler. More importantly, you have lots of options to choose from — major two of them is hiring a web designer and building your own website.

Both of these options pose certain pros and cons when we consider the entire process of building a website. Understanding these pros and cons is important while attempting to create a website as well. In this article, we are comparing the pros and cons of hiring a web designer vs. building your own website.

Hiring a Web Designer

This is one of the oldest methods to build a website for your organization, cause or yourself. Even in the 80s, when having a website was a million-dollar affair, you could have hired a web designer or a group of them. However, now that we have entered 2020, it’s time for a rain check on that. Apparently, there are pros and cons to this.

Pros of Hiring a Web Designer

You have these advantages when you give out the project to a professional web designer.

• It’s completely hassle-free: You don’t have to worry about a thing here. All you have to do is to tell the designer what you want from the website. The team would prepare some designs for review and get your approval. Some designers even take care of content and basic SEO, adding some cherry to the cake.
• Custom-Made: This is one of the reasons why people still prefer web designers. Instead of sticking to a template, a designer can help you build a customized website or web app. This process gives you such a huge advantage when you want to build an advanced e-Commerce or an innovative portfolio website.
• No Experience Required: You don’t have to be a WordPress or HTML/CSS expert for building the website. It works so well because you are hiring someone so skilled and experienced. Even if the specific person lacks the skill, he would arrange someone to complete the project. At the end of the day, you have fewer things to be worried about.

Cons of Hiring a Web Designer

Here’s the not-so-bright side.

• It’s expensive: Hiring a web designer can be an outright expensive affair. You may end up spending anywhere between $500 and $3000 to get a functional, reliable website. You may have to spend even more if you want advanced features and customized designs. Add to this the yearly maintenance fee.
• You lack Control: Every time you need to make a change on the website, you have to contact the web designer. This puts you in a position with no or little control. This can be a nightmare if you want to make updates to the website content more often than a normal company does. Thus, the yearly fee.

Building Your Own Website

People have tried to make websites by themselves and succeeded (or failed) from the very beginning. In the course of time, however, we have seen better documentation and tutorials. So, you have two options here. One, you can learn something like HTML/CSS/PHP and create your own from scratch. Two, you can use one of the many platforms for building a website with no technical experience at all.

Pros of Building Your Own Website

Let’s look at the bright side.

• Ultimate Flexibility: You have so much control throughout the process and even after you have built a website. In either case — you’re an expert or you use a website builder —, it’s definitely easy to make changes to the website content. From text to color and from shapes to scaling, you can change almost anything.
• Totally Inexpensive: Building your own website can be quite a minimal affair in terms of the amount of money you spend. Even if you go for the website builders out there, the monthly fee you pay will be incredibly low. In the latter scenario, you don’t even have to worry about hosting and domains as the service provider takes care of everything.
• Creative Control over Content: It totally depends on the platform you go for, but there are so many website builders that offer you creative control. You will be able to explore thousands of templates before choosing the right one for your needs. Similarly, you will even be able to create fully-fledged eCommerce websites with the help of these platforms.

Cons of Building Your Own Website

And, the disadvantages are:

• A Potential Learning Curve: This is applicable only when you want to create an advanced website. In this case, the popular website builders may not be enough. More importantly, you may have to learn some extra code, if not a coding language in its entirety. This can be a problem for a lot of people out there.
• Time Consumption: It does not matter even if you have the most intuitive website builder out there. You need to spend more time for building your own website. This may not be ideal for those with a tough schedule all day. At the end of the day, you don’t need a half-baked website, right?

The Bottom Line

We hope you understand the pros and cons of both these methods now. It should be noted that the process of building a website with a website builder has become more intuitive and affordable now. That brings lots of changes to the discussion in the first place. Similarly, you have affordable ways to hire a web designer as well.