In the latest issue of Print Magazine there is an article on DIY – Do It Yourself. There is no “right” or “wrong” when it comes to that. It’s great that people are branching out learning and trying new things, when it comes to design and writing many people try to “do it yourself”. It’s not hard to put up a website these days and write a few paragraphs about your business or product, but if design and writing is not your specialty then it is best to leave it to professionals. If you have zero to little budget sometimes DIY is the way to go.

Specialization is a part of our daily lives. Doctors are a perfect example of this; even though they are all in the medical field they are highly specialized to something specific and are experts in their field. You may have a first aid kit in the kitchen but that doesn’t qualify you as a doctor.

You get what you pay for. Having your secretary or the kid down the street design and code your website for your business that you have worked so hard to build is often not the best thing to do. If your website is going to be part of your business it needs to be treated seriously like any other part of your business such as overhead, insurance, marketing and administration.

“To fear that shoddy DIY work will replace good professional design is to suggest that the two are indistinguishable to the untrained eye. But the whole idea of good design or good writing, is that the untrained audience, will in fact, respond to some work better than others. In a competitive marketplace, clients value that edge.”

Print – March / April 2007

There is more to a website then what you see on the screen. The way the site is built, designed, coded, usability factors, hosting, seo, marketing all tie into the website. Someone who just knows the basics of Photoshop and an HTML editor will not know of all of the additional elements that goes into making a successful site. They may be able to make a decent looking site which may be fine, but if you want your website to be an important part of your business then you need to go with professional designers, programmers and writers.