How Building a DIY Website Is a Lot More Difficult Than You Think

How Building a DIY Website Is a Lot More Difficult Than You Think

A few weeks ago I was on Facebook, scrolling my feed, when I came across a post by an old classmate my mine. She was asking all of her Facebook friends the following question: 

Web design friends — I need with a very simple blogsite. Ideally, I would have you design it in WordPress and then I can manage it moving forward. I am just not a web designer but understand the backend of wordpress! Who does freelance web design?

Seeing that comment, I immediately jumped on the opportunity to help! Now, the first thing I did was try to point her in the right direction for her project. 

First, I took note that she didn’t have much of a budget and the idea of the Nextfly team building her a custom website, was not in the cards. Due to this, I thought about how we could find her a theme and customize it to work for her website project needs.

I asked her a few questions on what she was looking for in terms of functionality and design esthetics  and ended up finding one that I thought was the perfect fit for her! I was excited to help guide her in the right direction but realized soon enough that things would not end there.

Soon after she purchased the website template I had her asking me questions about what was next. She essentially needed help launching the theme on her domain. “Okay, I can help you out with this,” I said to myself, “but you better take it from here.” 

She did not.

I showed her how to get started on the theme and realized that soon after, more and more questions were coming my way about how to change things, add/remove functionality, and more! 

I soon realized that I was taking taking my work home with me by assisting her with her website project. 

The scope of the project became too much to handle and there were too many questions she had. She needed the guidance of another person and also, the advice as she had realized she was in great need of. 

We ended up getting together over dinner and pulled the website up. We swapped out photos, resize images, did some coding to overwrite some templated framework, added in plugins to add even MORE functionality to the website and more! 

So much time was spent on stripping out all the things she either didn’t like about the template or wanted to rebuild to better suite her needs. 

This whole process made her really understand how building a website takes a lot more time, organization and skills than she had originally thought. 

She definitely learned a lot in the process and truly understand the benefits of working with a professional website design company. At the end of the day, she knew she was lucky to have me there by her side during the project and I definitely gained compassion for my clients. Hoping into a website project is not easy, but having someone there to help you along, makes it a heck of a lot better!