Who should build my website?
Neglected aspects when ordering a site
In this page, we will focus on a different side of your website – who to trust to build it and what to watch out for in this really important decision for you.
In the website planning phase, these aspects are often overlooked, but in the long run, they can become a real problem.
Who will build my website?
With no doubt, choosing a web designer for your site seems easy. Every Google search returns dozens of results of companies and freelance web designers who are competing to offer you their services.
It seems really easy to choose a person or company to build your website, but the reality is very far from that.
It’s important to know that whether or not you personally take care of maintaining and updating your website, the relationship with the people who built your website will be long-lasting.
Even if you master all the intricacies of maintaining and updating your website, the people who built it will inevitably have to intervene sometimes when problems arise, as well as when more substantial changes are needed, when a redesign is needed, or a breach in the security of the site occurs.
It, therefore, is in your best interest to choose a person or company that has been in business for quite a long time and is likely to stay there also for quite a while ahead.
Believe me, it’s hard for me to count the number of times we’ve had site owners calling us and complaining that “the guy who built our site found another job” or “went abroad” and can no longer be reached!
Therefore, probably the first dilemma before you will be:
A company or a freelancer?
We know many fellow freelancers (freelance web designers) who really do wonders in their craft and are true professionals in their work.
Unfortunately, however, the common trait among freelance web designers is that for most of them, the “freelancer” stage is a temporary step towards finding a “serious” and “well-paid” job in a “big and rich company”.
As a result, very often it turns out that once they find the coveted “serious” and “well-paid” job, they turn their backs on their freelance life and forget about the websites of their former clients …
Therefore, our advice is: For the development of your site, choose a company with at least five years of proven experience behind. Thus, the probability that the authors of your site will simply disappear and never appear again will be minimized.
Building your website is a long-term investment, and no matter what, as long as your website exists, you will have to rely on the people who built it.
What platform should the website be built on?
If you have decided that you or someone in your company will take care of the maintenance and updating of the website, it is really important what platform (Content Management System, or CMS) it is built on.
Generally speaking, Content Management Systems are of two types: open source, and so-called “proprietary systems”, or systems made by individual companies for their specific needs or the needs of their clients.
Quite a few web design companies in our country offer their clients the equipment of their websites with their own CMS systems which, according to their claims, gave users more options and were more convenient to work with.
Sometimes this is even true, but there is a huge “but” here!
If the system on which your website is built is known only to the company that developed it, as long as your website exists, it should be maintained only by this company! And this is definitely not good for you…
As you know, divorces happen even in the best of families, and it’s the same with web design companies.
If for some reason you have to “break up” with the company that built your website, you will have only two options:
- To look for another company that is just starting to explore and master the work with the unknown CMS on your site, which, in addition to being uncertain, can also be an expensive undertaking.
… or … - To plan to build an entirely new website now based on an open source system, which will cost you additional money and you’ll be re-paying for something you’ve already paid for.
Therefore, we highly recommend choosing such a web design company that uses well-known and established open source content management systems in their work.
The best and most well-established such systems are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, and we specifically use WordPress in our practice, as the most intuitive, reliable, and widespread such system.
