Detrimental Effects of Using Website Builders

You know those movies where you see a group of teenagers going on a road trip across the country together? Everything is going fine until one of them suggests taking a shortcut through the woods. From that moment, you know there can be nothing but disaster lying in wait. The shortcut isn’t really at all what it promises to be.

Automated website builders appear to offer a shortcut to business owners to get a new website at low cost and without effort. As with anything that sounds too good to be true, you need to proceed with caution if you decide to go down this path. It’s very much akin to taking a mysterious shortcut through the woods.

The dangers along this path are many, and the rewards are few. Your website is too important to your business for that level of risk to be acceptable. Because no-one will scream a warning when you take a wrong turn, this article will have to do the job of alerting you to the hidden dangers of automated website builders:

You don’t get full control over the look and functionality of your website

You may expect that developing the website entirely by yourself using an automated system would give you more control over the result than if you turned over the job to a third party, but in fact the opposite is true.

In order to make it even possible for an automated system to generate a website, massive cuts have to be made in terms of the freedom the user has to determine how the site looks and functions.

Building the website yourself using just pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript gives you the ultimate in control, but that’s not an option for everyone. The safe middle ground here is to enlist the help of an expert developer.

Although there’s a fee involved, the savings in time and effort more than adequately make up for this. And, as the buyer, you get to dictate exactly how the finished project should look and function. Most importantly, it will look and function exactly as you specified which is something you just don’t get with an automated website builder.

When they say “free”, it doesn’t mean what it sounds like.

Providers of these systems like to lure newcomers in with offers of a free website or a surprisingly low price, but there’s always a catch. To get the full range of features, you’ll have to pay, and even with the free version, you’ll have to sacrifice some space to advertise the service you created the site on.

Adding insult to injury, many of the services have ads that are really ugly, and you don’t have any control over their appearance if they’re part of your free site.

You can’t automate talent.

This is a fact. They’re trying to give the impression that anyone can create a website, and whether that can be considered true or not depends on what you consider a website to be.

If you just mean a site that sits on the web, yeah, anyone can make one. But if you mean something that anyone would actually want to visit and could make proper use of, then it’s certainly not true that just anyone can make one.

The idea pushed by automated site builder services is that a predefined template can meet any need. That’s simply not true, and it invariably leads to disappointment. You need to make too many compromises when you use a template.

It’s just not real creativity, because there are constraints that must be met. Instead of a website being tailored to fit a message, that message has to be tailored to fit the template of the website, and if you have any message worth reading, that’s not something you should want to do.

Support usually isn’t very supportive.

What’s the likely outcome when you have a service provider where the customer base is actually composed of thousands of people who have very little idea of what they’re doing? Overloaded tech support is what. And even when you do get an actual response to your problem, it may not be very helpful because the simple fact is they didn’t build your website for you and they weren’t involved in the process at all. You built it, just like their advertisements suggested you should.

So the service provider doesn’t really have a good understanding of what you wanted to achieve, and doesn’t have time to figure that out because there’s so many others requesting help at exactly the same time. Big business may be reliable in some ways, but personal customer support isn’t one of them.

They make it harder to stand out from the crowd

Every snowflake is unique, but you have to pay really close attention to notice it. Guess what website users aren’t overly supplied with? That’s right… attention.

Now the problem with template-based site building is that it’s too standardised. There will be thousands, maybe even millions, of sites with the same basic layout and feel of your site, even if the pictures and words are different.

That doesn’t work well for you, because while you don’t want to be too different, you do want to be different enough that people actually stop on your page and look around.

When people see too many sites that look the same, they get bored and they don’t pay attention. You need a site that is familiar enough to be usable, but distinct enough that it gets noticed and succeeds in delivering its message.

There’s literally no advantage to doing things this way.

Honestly, the only thing automated site builders really offer is a potential cost saving over hiring somebody to build the site for you. When you take into account how much time you’ll be spending on the project, the headaches you’ll be in for, or the losses you’ll suffer due to giving up and compromising on your ideas, you’ll realise it wasn’t any kind of saving at all.

The easy way to a professional site.

Clearly, the shortcut offered by an automated website builder is too extreme. But there’s still a way to simplify things as much as possible. Elements Design Studio provides a service that simplifies all services connected with hosting a business website. That includes the development of the website, and on-going assistance from a dedicated network of professionals.

Getting help with your site is much easier this way. You’ll be dealing with someone who understands your business, who genuinely knows your name, and who has the time to listen and work with you to achieve the desired outcome. Don’t waste time looking for shortcuts. Hire an expert to take you there quickly and safely.