Website Builder or Custom Website

So, you're finally ready to start creating your website, and your options are either custom, or a website builder. Key factors in your decision will be budget, scalability (can your site expand over time to support new features), and ease of use. Let's dig in to each of factors.

Budget plays a big role in your site because creating it on your own with a website builder might be less expensive than a custom site built from the scratch. If your budget isn't super tight, you might entertain hiring a developer to develop and maintain your website. The downside to choosing to build the site on your own is you may be missing out on some key optimizations to your site, depending on your level of experience building one. That's what we're here for. Each website builder, whether it's Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, Wordpress, and etc all come with lengthy documentation for ways to optimize your SEO and UI. Not to mention, a lot of them come with a large selection of pre-made templates to choose from that you can fully customize.

Building a site from scratch offers far more flexibility in layout, it also requires much more time. If you have a very specific vision for your online presence, finding a developer to build your site is absolutely the route to go. Before you speak to a developer, make sure you have some inspiration to show them, buy the domain name you wish to use, and have the media assets and content (images, video) that you want on the site ready to go. This will make the process go faster. A custom site is more involved, but well worth it if you hire the right developer.

Scalability is managed for you when you use a site builder like Squarespace or Wix, although it gets more involved outside of those tools. We won't go into talking about servers and how your custom site will need to take this into account. The developer you employee should have some idea of how your site will scale.

Lastly, ease of use. The templates that website builders come with are designed with UX in mind. They're built to be user-friendly. When you're choosing inspiration for your website, make sure you choose sites that have a great user experience. You don't want your site to be hard to navigate.