Doing it Yourself vs Hiring a Professional
The Benefits of Doing It Yourself
If you design your whole site yourself you will have the benefits of full creative control and you will save a lot of money on designer fees—maybe. If it takes you a year or more to learn HTML and good design, or if you have to settle for a mediocre site, maybe not. But hiring a professional to do the whole thing can be expensive and changing or adding to the site can be a hassle.
But the halfway solution—hiring a professional to design the site and then updating and maintaining it yourself—could be the ideal solution for a small site.
Most designers charge from $30-$75 an hour. Some of what they do is worth paying for—like creating a professional image and designing the layout of your site. But editing and maintenance tasks do not necessarily require much specialized expertise. You hire a print designer to create a brochure; you do not want to pay them to photocopy it for you—but if it is complicated, you may need to hire a printer.
There are similarities between web publishing and print publishing, but there are also differences. When you design a brochure, you design it once, and then print it. But part of the beauty of websites is that they can be updated much more frequently than print media. But calling up your designer every three days to change a detail or add another page is not efficient—it takes too much time and it will add up quickly. So even if you do not want to or do not have the skills to design the webpage completely, it would be of great benefit to learn how to update your pages and create new pages.
Good Code is Good Design
Basically, HTML is not hard, but it takes a lot of time to learn how to do it right. The “language” is relatively easy, but the “customs” are hard—writing good code, designing an intuitive interface, manipulating images, learning the differences between how Explorer and Netscape display pages—making your page look good and work right takes a bit of time and some aesthetic ability. If you have a staff person or volunteer who is design-inclined and has a lot of free time, they might be enough. But there are pitfalls here. There is a reason web design is a profession, and it's not just the technical aspects that have to be learned—designing a page that is attractive, clean, and coherent—“professional-looking” is something that has to be learned as well.
The importance of design in print media is well understood—businesses are willing to pay for the services of a professional designer because they know it's worth it to project a professional image. Websites should be treated similarly.
Anyone with a printer and Word can print out labels and business cards on their home computer now, and anyone can buy FrontPage and start making their own website. But that doesn't mean that everyone suddenly has design skills and a sense of aesthetics.
Unfortunately, if you don't have this sense you don't always realize it's importance. When I was beginning to learn HTML and made my first webpage, it was hideous. A busy background made the text hard to read and animations distracted the eye. But I was so proud of that thing. Several incarnations later, I showed my page (still very far from looking professional) to a friend and asked him what he thought of it. He said it didn't look very “professional”. I was heartbroken—I'd worked so hard on that site! Coding HTML can be a time sink, especially when you first start—having spent so much time, I was sure I had made a beautiful site. But he showed me some sites that were made by professional designers, and showed me the coherent page navigation and the way the design elements worked together. He was right—I had yet to learn how to design well. But I kept at it and learned what makes bad sites bad and good sites good—and you can too, if you have the time.
The Halfway-Solution: Using Professional Templates
Templates are like letterhead for webpages. You can hire a designer to make a “template” once, and then you learn how to work with the template to edit your pages and create new pages. You save money, have control over your content, and your site has a consistent, professional appearance.
You will still need to learn the following however:
- how to get your pages onto the server (this is called uploading, and is done via FTP using an FTP program. I use CuteFTP. FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol", much as HTTP stands for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol")
- how to promote your site: getting it listed on search engines and improving your search engine ranking.
- how to arrange the navigation structure of your site. I recommend a clear hierarchical structure: this is easy to understand and is what all computer and web users are used to.
- and if you plan to use images on your site you will need to understand how they are displayed in browsers and obtain and learn how to use a graphic program to resize and optimize your graphics so they download quickly
When a Website is For More Than Just Information
The previous advice works fine if your site is primarily to display information about your organization, your activities, and relevant articles and information. This covers the majority of small nonprofit websites.
If you want your site to do more than that, you may have to hire a professional to help you out. For example, LBvision.org had a database of volunteer organizations in the local area. They wanted to create a website where people could search the database by location or interest and find volunteer opportunities. To accomplish this it is necessary to work with databases and actual programming, which is a lot more complicated to learn than HTML. Hiring a professional is well-advised.
I would also hire a professional to help you develop a content management system. These allow users to update their webpages without knowledge of HTML. These tools are used to automate updates of parts of the site that would need to be updated frequently, but are fairly standardized. For example, if you have an affinity linking campaign (exchanging your link with similar sites to help both of you in search engine results), you will want to add links to your site on a regular basis. If you have an online interface for this, it simplifies things greatly.