Website development is getting increasingly easy. Now you don’t need to be a web developer or a technical genius to build an e-commerce website or a news aggregator or a portal from scratch. There are many website builders and CMSs services, both free and paid, available that warrant little or no expertise for creating an online avenue for your products, services and musings. Earlier “up-and-running-in-a-few-minutes” websites were limited to personal blogs and simple static webpage. But with the rise of powerful website builders and online services, the websites for as complex as e-commerce industry can be created in a few hours, if not minutes. But can these services replace website developers? Not really!
You Will Not Get Every Feature
You may have an excellent idea to engage new visitors, but unfortunately you cannot see the idea in action as there is absolutely no way to do the same without changing the code or writing it from scratch. Heartbreaking, right? But this is the truth. Website builders and CMSs provide you with limited tools to play around. Even if you get access to source code, customizing it requires a lot of efforts and coding skills.
So even after creating your website and spending your time and money on it, you may end up compromising. This would definitely not constitute a good start.
You Will Not Get Every Feature
You may have an excellent idea to engage new visitors, but unfortunately you cannot see the idea in action as there is absolutely no way to do the same without changing the code or writing it from scratch. Heartbreaking, right? But this is the truth. Website builders and CMSs provide you with limited tools to play around. Even if you get access to source code, customizing it requires a lot of efforts and coding skills.
So even after creating your website and spending your time and money on it, you may end up compromising. This would definitely not constitute a good start.
Platform Specific Limitations
What if your online service, say Shopify, doesn’t allow you to move your online store to a new place? In fact, it is one of the biggest limitation of Shopify and many other services.
Similarly, WordPress has thousands of plugins but may or may not work the way you would have liked. Also, everything is dependent on the individual developer of that plugin, including design, functionality, bug-fixes, updates, and other changes. It may put many at unease.
Scalability
While most of the services do claim that their services are scalable, many turn out to be just partially true. Scaling up from 4 products to 4,000 products is a big task that may demand an entire website overhaul, which is not easy to do in “click-and-do-it-yourself” setting.
Cost
Open-source CMSs are free to download and install. There are many other services, such as Squarespace and Weebly, that don’t cost much to build and host your website. It may seem a good cost-effective solution, but there are many hidden costs that make the proportions look not as nice.
In case of Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress the free extensions and themes are generally not as powerful and customizable as the paid ones. The overall cost escalates as you keep adding the features. Also, upgrading cost for add-ons and extensions are substantial.
Hiring a website developer is costly, but the cost-difference between using online services and getting someone to code it for you is not as big as you assume.
Conclusion
There is a closely attached disadvantage to every advantage of using “do-it-yourself” website building services. Granted the entry barrier is at a new low, but it has come at a cost of flexibility and personalization. The web technology is yet to replace a seasoned developer, at least at an affordable price-point.
