“How many times have you heard—or said—this phrase? Yes, it’s something like: “Oh, no…why would I pay for a website? A friend/family member is going to make it for free.” Don’t deceive yourself: they won’t make it, it won’t be free, or it will be a shoddy website.
Why? Very simple:
1. The minimum time it would take to design a perfectly operational and functional website, positioned, optimized, linked to social networks, and a long list of functions that would need to be implemented, would start from 40 hours. Will they take that time away from their paid work? Or from their leisure time with family, hobbies, etc.?
2. Free? Will the friend/family member pay approximately €100/year for the domain and quality hosting? In case of using a CMS, will they use a free theme? Or will they pay approximately €80 for a premium one out of their own pocket? If we need or want an SSL certificate, will they pay for it too? What if we want it multilingual? Will they use a free plugin with sometimes very poor translations? Or will they use a paid plugin or even better, a multilingual theme—also paid? Oh, and will the acquaintance pay for it?
3. Let’s say that, despite everything, the friend/family member makes the website: I regret to say it will be a “shoddy” website. Let me explain: they will do it in a few free moments; with such a lousy hosting that half the time the website will be down (meaning it won’t work); with an outdated design (maybe it will look bad on mobile devices or seem like a website from the year 2000) because if they don’t do it professionally, they won’t be up to date on web design trends; or it won’t comply with current legislation (and this can result in fines of up to €150,000); or it won’t be detected and positioned by search engines; it won’t be integrated with major social networks or won’t be able to generate and measure engagement on them; they probably won’t explain that quality content needs to be generated to increase visits to the site and improve positioning… in short: it might look like a website, but it would only be a (ordinary) virtual business card.
“There is no second chance to make a first impression,” and if it is bad, whoever sees that website probably won’t buy (or won’t come, if it’s a local business; or won’t hire if it’s services being offered).”
Something else could happen…(read the second part)
Outdated web design
