Doing it yourself

It’s normal for people to want more bang for their buck. We all want value for money regardless of our financial position. With the state of the global economy over the last decade becoming more fragile, more and more people have been tightening their purse strings. Perversely, at the same time, there is an increasing expectation for everything to be done instantly. The world is moving at an ever increasing speed.

This applies very prominently in the web industry - and IT industry as a whole. Because of extremely clever programmers, it’s possible for the average Joe Bloggs to do very advanced and complicated things extremely quickly without having much technical knowledge. Just think of all the clever things you can do with Microsoft Excel. In the web world, the dawn of these “do it yourself” website builders has given people the ability to create nice looking and functional websites without any design or programming skills whatsoever, and for little to no money.

As a result, we’ve had to drastically change our approach over the last few years in order to compete. Long gone are the days where websites are sought after and people are willing to pay thousands of pounds for a completely bespoke site. Nowadays most people tend to baulk at spending more than a few hundred. Even our most advanced content management, ecommerce, all singing all dancing websites rarely cost much more than a thousand and that is for the top-end business.

We have started using Wordpress for some of our smaller budget websites and it works well. Of course, like all content management systems, it still requires the client to have a certain aptitude and basic technical knowledge to use. It also requires them to have the necessary time to update the content themselves and this brings me to my point: Do you really want to do this?

As a business owner, you need to focus on running your business. Do you really want to be spending valuable time editing content or loading products on your website? Do you really need to learn any complicated technical babble in order to administer it? Is it going to help your business? Probably not. It’s more likely to be detrimental to its efficiency.

We are seeing more of this. Although people want the ability to manage websites themselves, when it comes down to it few actually have the inclination to do so and still ask us to make changes for them. It’s the same with hosting. Especially with Wordpress sites, it’s not uncommon for people to question the need to spend money hosting with a web design company when they can do it themselves for less. This is true but then you have to know how to install the sites, configure them, set up datasources, change DNS settings, run updates… Again, nothing you couldn’t learn after a few hours Googling things but it’s a lot of time you are not spending on running your core business.

Here at Datapartners, we genuinely care about our customers’ businesses and want to make things as easy as possible. This is why we always try to encourage people to let us take care of everything. If you want a small Wordpress site, great. If you want a bespoke design and custom built site, no problem. If you want us to manage your site and make updates to content at your whim, we will be delighted to do this for you. Using our wide range of skills and experience we will even suggest things to help you make the most of your site.

Contact us about our content services

Published on 20 September 2018 at 10:32:00