When the time comes to finally breathe life into your very first website, you’ll be faced with the choice of doing it yourself of calling in the pros. Now, it’s safe to say that most will tailor their decisions in accordance with how much they have to spend, but there are more pros and cons to both than simple pricing alone.
There are simple site building tools all over the web today and many hosting packages include DIY building tools as standard, but assuming you could technically go for either approach, which would work out best for your business or cause? 
Simple DIY for Beginners
It’s perfectly possible to build a pretty solid website these days with zero experience or knowledge of how the process works. More often than not, templates are used along with a simple point and click interface to get the job done.
The positives of this kind of approach are pretty obvious – you don’t need to train or study in any way and you can get a simple website built and ready to go in a matter of minutes. What’s more, it’s technically impossible to make any mistakes as the process is largely automated, plus there’s the not so minor factor of the superbly low price…it might even be free.
As for the negatives, the biggest of all is the way in which the site is likely to be fairly limited in terms of scope, power, functionality and the availability of plug-ins and add-ons. Or in other words, you won’t be able to take it much further than its initial incarnation.
Advanced DIY for Intermediates
One step up is the option of using something like WordPress to create a site from scratch the DIY way, which is slightly more complicated than using a semi-automated site builder.
The pros of the advanced DIY route kick off with the relative simplicity of the building process and the fact that WordPress and other such content management systems offer much more scope for creativity. You won’t be limited to a few templates which means you can make a 100% unique site that represents your brand to the letter. It’s also a hugely cheap option for site building.
On the downside of things, you’ll need to know what you’re doing before you can get the best out of anything like WordPress which means a commitment of time, effort and practice. What’s more, it’s less automated than the above approach so you can indeed get things very wrong.
Professional Site Building
Last up, the non-DIY site building approach is to hire the pros – precisely as most bigger businesses do. Here you take something of a backseat and watch the whole thing come together, though there are of course pros and cons to take into account.
For example, the biggest pro of all is the world-class website you end up with which looks, feels and functions like nothing you could have built yourself. What’s more, chances are it will also come together much faster than had you tried your hand at making a similar site.
On the downside, a complex and richly featured website doesn’t come cheap and there’s a good chance that each and every time even a minor change is needed, you’ll need to call upon the site’s designers to do it for you.