Copyright 2006 Richard Grady
I built my first website approximately five years ago and since
then, I have always designed and built my own sites. This
process has served me very well and over the years, my web
building skills have advanced considerably (mostly through trial
and error!). I have always recommended to my customers and
subscribers that they too learn how to build their own sites and
this is for two reasons:
1. It means that you know exactly what is going on with your
site and how it actually 'works'. As you have built it piece by
piece, you know, quite literally, every aspect of it.
2. Doing the work yourself will save you a small fortune on web
design costs.
During the past couple of weeks though, I have done something
that I would have previously not even considered doing - I have
started to talk to a professional web designer with a view to
hiring him to build a new business website for me!!!
Why I hear you ask?
Well the answer is simple - because he can do a much better job
of it than I can AND he will take on all of the stress that the
project would have caused me.
I have an idea for a new online business (totally unrelated to
Internet marketing/eBay or any of the other areas that I
currently work in) and it needs a professional site with quite a
bit of 'behind the scenes' functionality. There is nothing like
it around at present which means that the functions I require
are fairly unique to this project. I have spent some time
talking to different programmers that I know around the World to
see if they can pool their expertise and write different bits of
the software required and link everything up through the website
that I build but it was just getting too fiddly.
I was at the point where I was ready to toss the whole project
out of the window when I took a step back and looked at things
from a completely different angle. What I really needed was one
person (or team) to take on the entire project and simply
provide me with the new website based on the brief I supply them
with.
So that's exactly what I have done. I have a rough idea of what
the site will cost and admittedly, it isn't going to be the few
hundred dollars that it would have cost me BUT the end result
should be far more professional and will be produced to my exact
specification. Most importantly though, it takes away all the
sleepless nights that I would have experienced as I went through
the process of trying to get everything to work together.
With this in mind therefore, I would like to amend the advice
that I have been giving out for the past few years......
Learn how to design and build your own business websites BUT
when you have learned how to do this, DO consider hiring
professionals and outsourcing some of this work as and where
possible :-)
About the author:
Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998.
eBay sellers find wholesalers for free at:
http://www.wholesale118.co.uk (UK) &
http://www.thewholesaletrader.com (US).
