Are you serious about your online business? Then have a proper website built and stay away from website creator platforms

26 June 2012

Having a website in today’s world isn’t a tough thing to do. If you sit down at the computer for five minutes, you can create a wide variety of websites and may never have to spend a single penny.

You can create a free blog on WordPress or Blogger. You can have a micro-site on HubPages or Squidoo. You can create a social networking presence on Facebook or Twitter. And you can even build your own website with services like Moonfruit, Weebly, WebStarts and MrSite.

The trouble with using services like these website creator platforms is that you often get what you paid for, and let's face it, if you've ever paid little to no money for any service anywhere in the world, you know what kind of service to expect. Little to no service, or a product to match.

It's not like you're going to get an award winning online shopping website just by paying £5 a month. You're more likely to get a Takeaway meal than anything else, and £5 wouldn't even pay for a pizza these days.

What's going on is that your expectations with these platforms are often not met because you are lead to believe that your small input is going to amount to a fully professional site.

It's like saying to a car designer, here's a few quid a month, now build me a Ferrari.

People who are serious about online businesses understand that if you want a quality solution you have to find a quality supplier, and that means going to a professional digital design agency. For only a little more investment, you can get so much more. Here are just a few reasons to get a professional bespoke site.

Benefits of Having a Real Website

Trustworthiness: There’s a level of trust that comes with having a real custom website. If you’re using a blog or a free website host, you’re basically saying to your customers that your business isn’t doing well enough to even afford a real web package. Who is going to trust you enough to buy from you if your site looks more like something out of a box than a real thought out website?

Added Features:  You get so many more features with a custom website. You often will have bespoke content management and also personalised features that matter only to your business. Every business is unique in their own way, and having a site that reflects this, and has the features to match, really brings out brand value.

Professionalism: Along with the extra tools and features, you can create a professional-looking site. When you have one of those free sites, you’re only allowed to use so many different templates and colors and styles. When you employ a digital agency, your imagination is the limit. You can create anything you want and present it in any way you choose.

Getting Traffic: There will always be a bias on search engines towards those sites which are custom built and built for a specific purpose. Multi-use platforms and web creation platforms like MrSite, Wordpress or Moonfruit are often less well regarded by search engines because they use a standard code structure across all their hosted sites and sooner or later you'll have certain sites which start to look the same as each other, and hence suffer certain duplicate content or duplicate code penalties on Google.

Think about it, if there are 500 other builders on the same platform making the same type of website around their building services, it's soon going to look pretty similar to each other.

The bottom line is that if you are serious about your online business, using these cheap or free platforms will only serve to waste your time and money, when you know full well at the beginning that you should have invested in a proper solution from the start.

It's never about the money, it's always about the mindset you start with, and cheap is almost never good quality.