Can I Do My Own Website?
Many businesses or
individuals in Windsor who want a website commonly ask the question:
"Can I develop my own website?" The short answer to this question is
yes, absolutely. In fact, developing a simple website is easier now than
it ever has been. Programs such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver or
Microsoft Front Page have made it easy to develop web pages with little
to no skill. Simply pick a pre-made template, type in your text, add a
couple of pictures and voila! You have yourself a website, right? Well,
sort of.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can't expect to
develop a professional looking, tightly coded, website just by plugging
your text into a pre-made template with a code generation tool. Yes,
software has greatly improved over the years with how it generates HTML,
the markup code that defines the structure of your web pages, but
generated code will always be bulkier, and less efficient than hand
coded HTML pages.
Most professionals in Windsor develop their HTML
pages by hand. In fact, most page developers rarely ever use anything
but a text editor to generate their pages. Professional page developers
will use HTML for what it was developed for, to describe the structure
of a page, and encapsulate the content of said page via the markup tags
relevant to the content at hand. What does all that mumbo jumbo mean?
Well, simply put, it means that a professional web page developer is
going to structure a page correctly, using the correct tags, not just
using tags that look right when a page is rendered to the browser. A
professional page developer never concerns himself with how the HTML
makes a page look, HTML is there to structure a page, not describe how
the style is defined. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) describes how the
nicely structured pages should look when rendered to the browser.
Moreover, the developer structures his/her pages so they render
correctly in all browsers, a task that the code generators fail
miserably at most times.
What's In Your Page Source?
Alright,
I will be the first to admit that most people don't care how bulky
their web pages are or how inefficient they are coded. Granted, most
visitors are on high-speed internet and those extra 500 milliseconds
your page takes to load isn't going to matter, right? Again, sort of.
You always have to be aware of how long your pages are taking to load,
and how responsive they are for your visitors. Studies have shown that
an average user will wait about 10 seconds for a page to load before
they navigate away out of frustration. I have a feeling that this study
was done before the vast majority of users had high-speed internet. I
suspect that tolerance to waiting is actually much lower.
Experienced
web developers and web designers will always optimize their images, and
HTML to load as quickly as possible. Images that are not properly
compressed can easily be 5 times larger than a properly compressed
image. Improperly compressed images can easily increase a web page load
by 5-10 seconds!
Got Google?
One of the biggest
detriments of doing your own web development is the lack of search
engine optimization. One of the most common causes of websites having
poor search engine rankings is because the page is full of HTML errors
which throw off the search engine crawlers. Web pages that are not
structured correctly, and have a lot of styling information inline with
the content will never rank well compared to websites that are
structured correctly with nice clean content.
So does this mean
that if you do your own website, you won't ever get listed in the search
engines? Of course not, but if a professional web designer or web
developer programs your HTML pages, your pages are much more likely to
get indexed correctly. Moreover, most web developers will put a link
from their well indexed site to your new site, which will further help
the crawlers find your site quicker. If your developer is experienced in
search engine optimization (SEO), that will even further liken your
chances to high rankings in the search engines.
How's It Going To Look?
Ok,
so we have established that yes you can do your own website. It might
be coded terribly, and not rank well in the search engines, but you are
still determined to do it yourself. Quick question, how is the site
actually going to look? If you are a good designer, and can make a nice
picture of how you want your site to look, you can use your code
generator to make it look the same right? Not quite.
Getting your
website to look the same as what you had envisioned is a very tricky
proposition for an inexperienced web designer. Developing for the web is
very different from developing a page for traditional print. In
traditional print, you have a fixed canvas (the page), whereas on the
web, you have several variables to contend with. First, you have no idea
what resolution your users will be viewing your web-pages at when
developing your website. What looks good at 1024x768 might look terrible
at 1280x1024 resolutions. To further complicate things, different
browsers can show the exact same HTML much differently. Specifically,
Internet Explorer based browsers use a different engine than Gecko based
browsers (Mozilla, Firefox etc). It can be truly frustrating even for
experienced developers to try and keep things looking the same across
the board, but for a do-it-yourselfer it can be an impossible task.
Ok,
let's say you've tackled all the compatibility issues. How will the
website actually look when it's done? Will it look professional? Or,
will it look like a do it yourself site? If your website is being used
for business, what image do you waAnt to attach to your company?
Are You Scared Now?
It
really isn't my intent to suggest that you shouldn't try to develop
your own website. I still maintain that a lot of people can develop a
fairly decent site themselves, especially if they have a basic
understanding of HTML and a fairly good design sense. One good approach
to doing it yourself is to have a web developer that you can consult
with on some of the more technical issues. You can save a lot of money
by doing it yourself and letting your developer check your work for any
major issues with the web pages. Many web developers in Windsor will
gladly check your pages over at an affordable hoAurly rate, correcting
any major issues.
Having a developer to walk you through some of
the more technical aspects of web developing can be a very sound
approach if you want to do your own web programming. You really do have
to weigh the hourly rate of checking the code against the cost of having
the developer program everything.
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