As a business owner, freelancer or affiliate marketer, there’s no much need to reinforce the importance of having a great looking professional business website. Even if you conduct business in person most of the time, your business website can sell your products or services even before the client talks with you, or scare potential clients away by looking unprofessional or untrustworthy. However, when it comes to deciding whether to outsource your business website or do it yourself the answer isn’t so clear.

Can You Create A Professional Business Website Yourself?

It’s relatively easy to create a free, professional looking business website that does the trick, provided you don’t want anything very specific and you don’t mind having a somehow generic look. You can use a popular CMS such as WordPress and find a free or low cost wordpress business theme that more or less suits your business corporate image and colours. Then you can spend more time customising it so it doesn’t look like the other hundred websites that choose the same theme. Or you can use a WordPress theme framework such as Headway that comes with a visual editor to create a unique but standards compliant and search engine friendly personalised theme for your business website.

But Can You Afford It?

However, all this tinkering with an existing theme or using a framework requires one thing. Time. And time is something most small business owners don’t have in large amounts. The time you spend fixing your WordPress theme to look exactly as you want it is time you don’t spend selling or working on paid work for your clients.. If you are starting a business and don’t have many clients yet, or are still working on your day job waiting for the day to finally start up, creating your own business website by yourself could be a way of reducing business start-up costs. But if you are already established and working full time for your clients you should really consider hiring a professional to design and develop your website for you.

Before trying to learn CSS and web development or downloading WordPress and trying to edit a complex theme without it becoming a buggy mess, consider how much money is your time worth, and how long realistically would it take you to create a website you are proud off. If after factoring this in you can create a website for a lower cost than outsourcing, give it a try. Web design for business is both fun and rewarding, and receiving positive feedback from your clients about your amazing website feels great. However, make sure you don’t fall in the trap of losing money because you choose to do all the work yourself when you don’t have the time or skills required.