Building It Yourself or Paying Somebody

The honest starting position

Website builders have got good. A capable person with a weekend can produce something that looks fine and works on a phone.

Anybody telling you otherwise is protecting their trade. Plenty of small businesses run perfectly good sites they built themselves.

So the question is not capability. It is time, and what happens at the parts where you get stuck.

Pricing your own hours

The step almost nobody takes, and the one that settles it.

A simple site, built by somebody doing it for the first time, is realistically thirty to fifty hours. That includes learning the tool, writing the words, sorting the photographs, and the evening you lose to one alignment problem.

Multiply by what an hour of your time is worth. Not your charge-out rate necessarily, but what you would otherwise earn or what you would pay to get an evening back.

For a tradesperson billing a few hundred a day, forty hours is a week of capacity. Against a quote for a small site, the arithmetic frequently favours paying somebody, which surprises people who assumed the opposite.

For somebody with genuinely spare evenings and no billable alternative, the arithmetic goes the other way, and that is a legitimate answer.

Where people actually get stuck

Not the design. The design is the part the tool handles.

Writing the words. Consistently the biggest delay. Businesses stall for months on a services page nobody can start.

Photographs. Finding usable images of your own work, at a size that does not slow the page down, in a consistent style.

The contact form actually arriving. Forms fail silently and constantly, and testing them properly is not obvious.

The domain and email. Connecting a name you bought elsewhere, without breaking mail that is already running.

Being found afterwards. A site that exists is not a site anybody sees. This is the gap that disappoints most people who build their own.

Four of those five are not design problems. Which is why "can I use the builder" is the wrong question.

The last twenty percent

The pattern worth expecting.

The first eighty percent goes quickly and feels encouraging. The remaining twenty takes as long again: the page that will not lay out on a phone, the font that looks wrong, the form that sends to nowhere, the address that will not connect.

That is where self-built sites stall. Not abandoned, just permanently ninety percent done, with a placeholder page and a service list that was never finished.

A half-finished site is worse than none, because somebody found it and formed an impression.

What you are actually buying

If you pay, it helps to know what for.

• The decisions. What pages exist, what goes on them, what order they are in.
• The writing, or at least the structure and prompting to get it out of you.
• The things that break silently: forms, redirects, mail records, mobile layout.
• Being findable, which is a separate skill from building.
• Somebody to call when it stops working at an inconvenient moment.
• Your weekends back.

The fifth is undervalued until the first time you need it.

A worked example

A one-person electrical contractor deciding between a builder subscription and a quote for a small site.

The subscription is a modest monthly figure. The quote is a few thousand once, plus a small annual cost afterwards.

On paper the subscription wins for years. That comparison ignores the forty hours, which at his day rate is more than the difference between the two options in year one alone.

It also ignores what happens in month three, when he wants a page for a new service and has forgotten how the tool works.

His actual decision was a middle one: pay somebody to build four pages properly, learn to edit text and add photographs himself, and leave the structure alone. He spent about a third of the full quote and roughly six hours of his own time.

That arrangement suits more small businesses than either extreme, and almost nobody is offered it.

What breaks a year later

The part nobody factors in when comparing the two routes.

A self-built site on a subscription platform depends on that platform. Templates get retired, editors change, features move behind higher tiers. None of it is catastrophic and all of it costs an evening.

The more common failure is simpler. You built it, you have not touched it in eleven months, and you cannot remember how. The service you wanted to add takes an hour of relearning before you start.

A built-for-you site has the mirror problem: you cannot change anything without asking. Which is fine when the person answers and expensive when they do not.

Both are arguments for the same thing, which is knowing before you commit who changes the site in eighteen months and what that costs.

When doing it yourself is clearly right

Being specific rather than pretending it never is.

You have genuinely spare time and no billable alternative. The site is simple: a few pages, no shop, no bookings. You enjoy the work, which matters more than it sounds. You are testing an idea and expect to rebuild anyway. Or the budget is genuinely not there, in which case something you built beats nothing.

The one condition worth holding: register the domain yourself, in your own account. Whatever else you do, do not let the builder own the name.

The middle option in detail

1. Pay for the structure and the setup, which is where the technical failures live.
2. Write the words yourself, with somebody giving you the questions to answer.
3. Supply your own photographs, taken to a brief.
4. Learn to edit text and add a page, which takes an hour to teach.
5. Agree who to call when something breaks, and what that costs.

That splits the work along the line where each side is actually better, and it usually costs less than half of a full build.

One caution on it. Agree in writing which parts you are allowed to change, because a site handed over with a warning not to touch anything is a site you will be paying somebody to edit for the next five years.

Either way, the prior question is whether the site is needed at all yet, which is covered in deciding whether to build a site at all.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.