Why Small Business Owners Should Not DIY Their Website Design: 5 Critical Reasons to Hire a Professional

Why Small Businesses Shouldn't Make the Mistake of Trying to Do Website Design Themselves

As a web designer who has worked with hundreds of small businesses over the past decade, I've seen the costly mistakes and frustrations that come when a business owner tries to build their own website. While DIY website builders like Wix and Squarespace make it seem easy to create a website, the truth is it takes specialized skills and an eye for design to build a website that truly resonates with your target audience and converts visitors into leads and sales.

In this article, I'll walk you through some of the key reasons why DIY website design often ends up as a frustrating waste of time and money for small business owners - and why even a simple brochure site is often better left to the professionals.

You Don't Have the Technical Skills

Even with drag-and-drop website builders, you need HTML, CSS, and possibly JavaScript skills to build a custom website that stands out. Most DIY platforms have rigid templates, limited design options, and clunky interfaces that make intricate customizations difficult. Without coding skills, you'll end up with a cookie-cutter site indistinguishable from the competition.

Professionals with development skills can build a site from scratch using platforms like Webflow for custom animations, interactions, and responsiveness. The visual difference between a template site and a true custom build is immediately obvious.

You Lack an Eye for Quality Design

Good design is more than just making a website look "clean" or "modern." It's about understanding core principles like typography, color theory, spacing, and visual hierarchy. Design establishes trust and professionalism, directs the user journey, and reinforces branding.

DIY platforms make it easy to inadvertently create illegible text hierarchies, clashing fonts and colors, disjointed layouts, and confusing navigation. Non-designers simply don't have the foundational skills needed to intuitively create experiences optimized for aesthetics and usability.

Professional designers devote years to honing their craft. They understand how to arrange elements for optimal flow, choose fonts and colors that reinforce branding, and create balanced, pleasing compositions tailored to your business.

You'll Fail to Understand Your Audience

Your website exists solely to attract, engage, and convert your ideal customers. To do that effectively, you need to intimately understand your target demographics and what resonates with them.

As an outsider to your industry, you simply don't have that insight baked in. You run the risk of making incorrect assumptions about your visitors' motivations, failing to emphasize the right selling points, and using messaging that doesn't speak to their deepest needs.

An experienced designer intimately interviews clients to uncover who their customers really are and what persuasive messaging will appeal to them. This empathetic approach results in websites finely tailored to convert each visitor into a customer.

You Won't Grasp Proper SEO

Ranking high in search engines like Google is crucial for driving traffic to a small business website. But effective on-page optimization involves numerous intricate details non-designers fail to implement, from meta tags to alt text to responsive image sizing.

Beyond technical SEO, you need to deeply understand topics like keyword research, local SEO, and voice search optimization. Without mastery of these concepts, you won't drive search visibility and traffic.

SEO experts stay on the cutting edge of algorithm changes and best practices. They optimize every element of a site for search engines while keeping the focus on creating the best user experience.

You Lack Insight into Conversions

At the end of the day, your website needs to drive conversions to grow your business - whether that's ecommerce sales, lead generation, or customer engagement. To optimize for conversions, you need to grasp concepts like sales funnels, user psychology, and friction reduction.

As a business owner, you're too close to your own product or service to objectively identify friction points in the buying process. And if you build your own site, you have no impartial data on where visitors are falling off.

Analytics-focused designers continually run A/B tests and user studies to refine sites for higher conversions. Their analytical perspective uncovers optimization opportunities you'd likely overlook.

In Summary

Does all this mean small business owners can't participate in their website design process? Absolutely not. You should provide critical input on your industry, customers, branding, goals, and more.

But the technical and creative execution is best left to experienced professionals. A custom website perfectly tailored for your business and audience delivers immense long-term value that far outweighs the initial investment. Don't handicap your business with a DIY site - partner with a designer to build an asset that fuels sustainable growth for years to come.