Should You Build it, Or Let Us?

Nowadays, building a website isn’t rocket science. That’s right, we said it—let all the high-priced web designers roll their eyes and sigh. At North Florida Web, we’ve been building and marketing business and niche websites for over 20 years, so we know what we’re talking about. With the explosion of ready-made templates and drag-and-drop web builders like our Site Builder, building websites has never been easier!

With a little up-front money, some trial and error, and a fair amount of Googling “what does this mean,” most people can build and publish their own website. However, there are a lot of other nuts and bolts that go into publishing a successful website besides the actual building of the site. These include:

• API services
• Google Search Console
• Google Business Manager
• XML sitemaps
• Analytics … and a host of other connective concerns that go into a modern website these days.
• SMTP Mail connectivity

The thing is, every day we hire professionals to do tasks that, if we put our minds to it, we could probably do ourselves. However, when you hire a pro, not only will you skip the chore, time, and aggravation, you’ll know that the job was done correctly and will stand the test of time. After all, it’s not like small business owners have a lot of spare time on their hands, right?

Building a website is akin to building a house; it’s never as cheap as you originally planned, and there’s going to be an unpleasant surprise along the way. The web, as it relates to web development, is generally free or very cheap to get set up to build a website. However, that is where the charity ends because those “free” plugins or extensions all have “premium” versions that you will need to purchase to get the full functionality of the plugin. You will probably need a premium theme because all of the “free themes” are desperately wanting.

Ensuring that Google and Bing can easily find and index the website is just as critical, or even more so, than building a nice-looking website. We call it “making the trains run on time.”

These are:

• Web hosting
• DNS management
• Domain management
• SEO optimization
• Schema markup
• Caching for server speed
• CSS and HTML validation and much more.
• Social media connectivity
• Google My Business

One of the most common questions we get from customers is: “Why are you guys less expensive than the other web designers?” The answer is simple: because we can.

In our opinion, the main reason web design is so expensive is that everyone is specialized to a specific niche of the web design process. For example, most design agencies will reference “our design team” when quoting a job or marketing their business. The problem with the word “team” is not the aspect of a team working together; it’s the fact that they MUST have a team in order for them to build a website.

In today’s era of specialization, you have front-end designers, back-end coders, graphic designers, video editors, JavaScript gurus, CSS & HTML experts, IT and server support services, and more. Generally speaking, people in these positions usually only function in THAT specific role. Nowadays, asking a “front-end” person to work on “back-end” issues is analogous to going to a podiatrist for a sore throat. Meaning, most of the larger companies that we compete with have a “team” because it LITERALLY takes a team to build a functioning website.

At North Florida Web, we do 99% of all our projects in-house. This is because we are “the team.” North Florida Web is run by two experienced web developers who can complete almost every aspect of the web design process from start to finish. We don’t need a team of high-priced specialists making $90 an hour to do the things that it takes to get a website up and running. We can do it cheaper, simply because we can.

A Little More About North Florida Web …

North Florida Web was preceded by Aunica Media LLC, a web publishing company that, at its height, published and managed well over a hundred websites. In 2012, we sold the publishing end of our business and all of our revenue-producing web properties and semi-retired.

In retirement, we learned that we did not miss the business end of the publishing business, but we did miss the creative end of the business. We missed that feeling we would get from taking a single idea and transforming it into something both meaningful and beautiful. Something that has a purpose, form, and function. In short, we missed building websites.

So, we opened North Florida Web … and now we do webby things 🙂