Nowadays, site builders are basically a magic toolbox to everyone who is not a web designer. Building a website, which was once out of reach, can now be done with little effort – but there are things that website builders cannot do that web designers can. The question is, should you hire a web designer to make your site or simply use a website builder and build it yourself?
Site builders like Wix, IMCreator, Weebly, and Jigsy have helped millions of people create sites with ease, without having experience using Photoshop or programming knowledge. For people with small site needs, these tools are very helpful. There are many site builders, most of which emerged in the last years, where people can build a site simply by dragging and dropping things, publishing their websites within a day. Similarly, there are literally millions of talented web designers out there, and their numbers are growing every day.
This can be confusing, especially if you are looking to build your first site, but both builders of websites and web designers have their pros and cons that you should analyze carefully before making a decision.
Site Builders
For those who do not speak the same language as web designers, site builders are a gift from heaven. There are many builders of web sites with hundreds of templates for you to use and everything is very simple. No programming, no FTP connection, no registration of domain names and name servers, and all these technical things. Once satisfied, users can simply publish their websites and voila, are already up and running.
Although these site builders appear to be perfect, they can easily lead to a lot of confusion and problems. Things like transferring to a different hosting, their limited resources, and design redundancy are just some of the common problems in the long run may occur.
Web Designers
If you hire a web designer who can provide all the right features, you will have your own hosting account and will not have to worry about transferring your website from one server to another. And you will not be limited by the resources and flexibility.
The needs of your site will certainly increase to grow your business and audience. And this is exactly the problem with all site builders: they will not be able to accommodate your needs with increasing traffic to your site. With a good web designer, you can ask for features that hardly find in website builders. Features like a rotating banner, a poll, dynamic navigation, a robust image gallery, and other things you might need.
So, if your needs are simple, and likely to be so for many years, spending a few hours building your own website through a site builder is practical. This is because, usually, catalog sites do not need a lot of fancy features. Only a gallery, a place to include text and other simple things. The same is also true for restaurant sites.
But if you need other things, like an online shop, a news site, membership sites, forums and heavy sites with similar features, it is highly recommended to seek professional services. This way you will save time, money and energy, and will end up with a site matching your needs.