The Number 1 Mistake To Avoid When Looking to Build A New Website

You’ve decided it’s time for a new website for your small business or personal brand. GREAT! If you hire a website designer or developer to build it for you (or both in one🙋🏻‍♀️), you want to be sure to avoid this mistake I see all too often.

Do NOT get a custom-coded website.

Instead, I want you to make sure whomever you hire starts with a pre-packaged website theme.

“But Channing, I want my site to be unique to me and not a copy of someone else’s site,” may be your next thought.

I 100% agree that is absolutely the goal and a perfectly reasonable one. This can be a reality starting with a pre-packaged set of theme files that are customized to your brand, marketing strategy and business goals.

Let me now explain my reasoning further and give you the top 2 reasons why a custom-coded website is a bad long-term investment.

REASON 1: It takes longer to create.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but a fully custom-coded website takes considerably longer to build than one that starts from theme files. That means more time waiting for your digital presence to come to life, ecommerce setup to start bringing in sales, and an overall time suck on your energy.

On the flip side, because I started with theme files, the website below took me 1.5 days. That is a solid 1.5 days of strategy development, copywriting, custom graphics, and website development for 14 pages.

(Yes, it also takes nearly 10 years of website development experience to do it that fast, but I’ve perfected a system that harnesses my creativity in the most effective way for my clients and it just so happens to be zippy fast. #experience)

REASON 2: You won’t be able to edit the site yourself!

When there is a ton of custom coding, you generally need a website developer in order to make updates. That means you are either:

a) hiring someone full time, OR

b) are locked into working with the same person who built this site for as long as you have it.

Neither of those options is really the most economical business decision. Plus, the latter assumes you had a great working relationship with the developer and want to keep funding their business, a fact you know isn’t always the case.

A Better Investment: Yourself

On the other hand, I fully believe YOU should own your website. It does take a lot of skill, experience and knowledge to build a website, even if you are starting with theme files. However, once it is built with a framework customized to you, keeping it updated is not brain surgery. (And even THAT can be taught!)

I believe that you are perfectly capable of changing a photo, creating a blog post, and/or making small copy edits. Once the site is built with theme files, this can be taught.

(This is also why I provide video tutorials to all my website clients on request. If you have a desire to learn, I can teach you.)

Unlike other marketing agencies or website developers, I want you to take advantage of a Website Maintenance Plan because you don’t want to do the monthly work it entails (and you DO want the added marketing strategy recommendations), not because you can’t do the work.

Does that sound like an approach you want for YOUR brand or business website? Then let’s talk and see if a new (or redesigned) website by DCM is the right step for you.