If you’re a small business owner, you’ve probably wondered about doing it yourself, rather than spending the time learning to code – or spending the money to hire a professional developer.
Serious Flaws with Free Website Builders
If you’re a small business owner, you’ve probably wondered about doing it yourself, rather than spending the time learning to "code" or spending the money to hire a professional developer.
- FREE is never really FREE! If you ever want to do anything cool or upgraded for your website you have got to pay.
- Most of the time your website will have an Advertisement for FREE WEBSITES in the footer and that just makes your whole company look cheap
- If you ever leave their services you lose everything!
- Some tools limit your ability to increase your traffic using SEO methods that are highly important.
- You will pay for more pages, bells and whistles. While this is a common practice in the web design world there’s no reason why you should pay for more pages when you’re the one developing them and adding all of the content yourself. You’re Paying them so that YOU can do all of the work? That’s not right!
- Some of these sites also SPAM your customers. So let’s say they come to you to buy one of your products. Well, for the next few days or weeks all of the ads on any other website they visit will present your competitors to them… This is spamming your customers. You can lose revenue very quickly.
- You are more than likely going to still need some sort of photoshop editor to get your logo designed the correct size and to re-size (web optimize) all of your images
None of these free website builder hide the fact that you can upgrade to premium accounts and pay for all sorts of features… but they forget to tell you that you can invest hundreds of thousands of dollars over the year and if anything happens where you want to leave them you will lose it all. Not one bit of your investment belongs to you! That is HUGE!
When all of this said is there ever a time when a FREE website is a good thing? Yes. I’m sure that sounds weird coming from a "web design company" but it’s true. If you’re a non-profit struggling to raise funds, If you’re an artist just trying to be known. If you are a total grass roots effort trying to save every penny possible to make your dreams come true, a free website might serve its purpose, but remember that if you’re needing search engines to find you and you’re going to rely heavily on SEO then you’ll need to invest in either being trained how to handle your SEO or Social Media Marketing when using one of these "free sites". They are quite limiting and you might just learn at that point how valuable a custom-made website can be for your organization or business.
Our best suggestion is to find a web company like ours that will help Non-Profits with a discount, or raise the money in one of your first fundraiser events to build a dynamic website that brings legitimacy and even more avenues to your group to help with revenue or sales. You get what you pay for, nothing is truly "free" That couldn’t be more true with websites.