Before we start, of course we are a web design company, but critically we are non-profit with a goal to help organisations have a good web presence, not make a profit. We spend a lot of effort bring down costs and showing our clients where some things can be done for free.
So, what is the ‘cost’ of free web design? It’s how saving money initially has -in our experience- ended up costing our clients more in the long run. In fact we regularly have to rescue clients from such situations which can get quite difficult on occasions.
The usual story …
Usually someone will offer to provide a website for free as a favour, or to use some kind of ‘free’ service online. They tend to handle everything, including the hosting, and it is all meant with the best of intentions – believing in the product/organisation and/or wanting to build a portfolio, along with a promise of ongoing support.
Of course a good portion of the net is built this way and some really great content is unleashed as a result but it is usually a first step. Indeed most ‘cool blogs’ or organisations then take their second step to redesign their site entirely with a web company when they have more of an idea of what works, etc.
Where it all falls down
An individual web designer may well be very talented, though it is unlikely in all the key areas. For example, a graphic designer will create a graphic-laden site which won’t be great for Search Engines, a more technical geek may dot all the i’s and t’s but not be quite so creative visually and again it all falls down.
Also typical is that things have been designed in a bit of a rush, so to change anything on the site requires going via the web designer each time. This works well until they get a full workload, offered a better paying job or move abroad (we’ve seen it happen more than once!).
Hosting tends to be a bit problematic, like when you need another email address and need help setting it up but they are too busy to offer support. In some cases sharing the hosting space with the web designer means iframes are used to hide the full address (bad for search engines) or there isn’t space to add new functionality as the allocation of databases have been used.
Similarly it is easy to reach the limits of one person’s know-how when you want to add new functionality like a custom database, search engine optimisation or stray into advertising, etc.
What you should do instead
This blog post might sound a bit negative, but we’ve seen it all too often. Indeed we get enquiries for a site, they find a ‘free’ option and then 9 times out of 10 are back because it is a false economy.
What you really want when specifying a website is the following support:
- a separate hosting account for your site
- your name specified as owner on the url/domain name
- consistently available support that is unlikely to change
- hosting with MySQL databases (for systems like WordPress, databases, etc)
- a graphic designer, a technical geek and ideally someone with a knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (often these are separate people)
