MBA1014 Is a Custom Built Website Worth It?

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Hey O welcome to the $100 RMBA show. The answers you're looking for to build the business you want with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn. Is a custom built website worth it? I get asked this question quite frequently and it's time to answer it. It's time to explain. Is building a website for your business from scratch worth the effort and of course the money? Should you invest all that so you can have that custom website? What's involved and what exactly are we talking about when we say effort, time and money. And with technology today and the tools available, are custom websites really becoming something of the past? I'm going to get into all that as well as my personal recommendation depending on where your business is when it comes to this topic. And I know a bit about this because I've built custom websites before. I've had people do it for me and I've used tools that would drag and drop and make things easier for me and use that type of website for my business. Does it make a big difference? Does it affect My bottom line, I'll share with you what happened and how you can use my experiences to make a decision for your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to begin today's lesson by defining what I mean by a custom built website. A custom built website is a website from scratch. That means you're starting with a blank piece of paper, no themes, no drag and drop editor, just pure code, baby. Now for most of us this is actually even hard to conceptualize. But a lot of people feel this need to create this custom built website. They have a vision in their head and they want to see it come through. So they go ahead and they hire somebody to build it for them. I want to start off by saying that your website is probably one of the biggest assets in your business. It's very close after your actual product and offering because it's how your customers will interact with your business. It's their first impression of you when they do a Google search. It's really what gives you and your business and products or services credibility. So your website is important. I'm not belittling your website in any way. I'm the first person to say your website is very, very important. But today what we're trying to explore is do you actually need to have a custom built website where somebody designs it from scratch and codes it from scratch? Or is using a theme good enough? Like using a theme in WordPress or using a drag and drop website building tool like weebly, like one of our sponsors? Is that good enough? Will that differentiate enough or to take it a little further, can you take your vision and use one of these tools to make it happen? That's what we're going to discuss here. Let's begin by stating a fact that needs to be said. Building a custom website is going to cost you money, time, effort, and it's not as easy as you may think. Why? Because most of us don't really know what we want. We want it to be unique and cool and different, but we really don't have a picture in our head. We're going to have to hire a designer to translate our ideas and our thoughts and our themes into an actual website design. And this person is not going to be cheap, especially if they're any good and they're just designing. This is just Photoshop here. You really can't do anything with the design unless it's coded. So you're going to need a developer as well. And of course that coder, that developer needs to Be able to build it on a platform that you can use, like a CMS platform so you can edit the content of your website at any time. If this sounds confusing, it's because it is. Building a website from scratch is a lot of work and takes a lot of smart people to pull it off. People that are really experienced in building websites from scratch. So if that's not you, if you're not gonna actually do this yourself, then understand you're gonna be in the dark here. You're gonna be kind of hoping that everybody knows what they're doing and you're not gonna really know how long things actually take. And to be quite honest, it's gonna stop you from actually starting your business because you're just gonna be waiting for this website to be built. Now, I'm gonna say right off the bat, right now, full disclosure, there are circumstances that building a custom website makes sense and, and is the right choice. But right now I want to talk about when it doesn't make any sense. Number one, if you're just starting your business and you haven't sold anything yet, you haven't actually made a sale yet, then you should never start with a custom website. Why? Because you don't have a business on your hands yet. Why would you invest so much time, money and effort in something you don't even know is going to be successful? You need to use a tool that's going to help you build a website fast. You need to get out in the world so you can be actually offer your products and services. You got to get over yourself and your ego and your design aesthetic and create a website that's close to your vision. And that's very possible with the tools I mentioned earlier. So the goal when you start a business is to open for business. To see if your products and services are things that your customers actually want, that you're actually offering something that people actually need. Once you establish that and you're profitable and the ball is rolling and you have a surplus of cash and you want to reinvest in your website, you may want to think about creating a custom website. But let me tell you right now, it's not essential. I have a bookmarks folder of a bunch of websites that are hideous. If I showed them to anybody, they'd say that's a pretty ugly looking website. Every single one of those websites are profitable businesses, highly profitable business. And it's a reminder to me that, yes, I believe great design is important and I really love great aesthetics. And if you know anything about our Brands or businesses or any of our websites. You'll see that we put a lot of effort into that. But the reality is you can do very well with simple design, with even ugly design. Now, that was an extreme example, but I want to point out that your website really isn't the design. Not the fancy graphics and transitions and animations. That's not really what's going to make or break your website. What's really going to make or break your website is what you communicate, or to put it simply, the words. The words on your website. And I want to share with you a webpage that communicates this perfectly. And this is a webpage by Justin Jackson, one of our guest teachers in the past. And you can check out this webpage@justinjackson.ca words. And this is a simple page with just words. And the point of this simple webpage is to say words are very powerful and you should start with words. When it comes to your design, you have the right design. So really the content of your website, not the window dressing. And a lot of us focus on the window dressing way too much. And it's the reason why we want to build a custom website. The next thing I want to share is that when I say custom website, I'm not talking about a web app needs special functionality. I'm talking about a website to sell your products. Having said that, with the technology we have today, with services like Weebly and other sort of drag and drop tools, you can start from scratch. You can actually build a website from scratch by dragging and dropping different elements of that website. And you can get pretty darn close to the design you want. So if you want to, you can actually meet yourself halfway. What do I mean? You can actually hire a designer to design the website the way you want it. Once it's designed in Photoshop or whatever, or even just in a PDF, you can take that design and reproduce it using the drag and drop tools. The same columns, the same type of elements, whether it's video, text, images, you name it. So reproducing a design with the common tools in a drag and drop website builder is an easy way to have a customized website with no headaches, with a lot less money. That leads me to the next thing. When you build a custom website from scratch, you're gonna use somebody to maintain it constantly. That means you need to have somebody that you at least have to pay hourly, a freelancer, to fix things, to change things. Because again, it's code. It's not a drag and drop editor, it's not Something that you can change yourself. And it's not a company that has, you know, a 24, 7 life support. Trust me, I know this. I run a software company, Webinar Ninja, and we have a team of developers working on things, constantly improving, tweaking things, fixing bugs. And anytime you build anything customized, you're going to need somebody to improve it, change it, or to just be able to adapt to the changes around them. You know, web browsers like Firefox, Chrome or Safari, they are always updating their actual browser. So you have to update along with those updates to make sure your website looks just as good as it used to. Now, when you have a tool like a drag and drop editor, website builder kind of thing, they do that all for you. They make sure it's responsive so it looks great on a mobile device. A new mobile device comes out like the iPhone X, you don't have to worry about it. With a custom website, you have to worry about it. You got to make sure that your website works on all screen sizes. You get the point. So even if you have a thriving business, even if you have the money to spend on a custom website, you may want to reconsider because it's not a one time investment, it's an ongoing investment. And I've been doing this for a long time and in the last 10 years I'm finding it very, very hard to, to find a reason to really build a custom website. Unless you need some special functionality that some of these drag and drop editors don't have. And even then you might be able to get that customized for you with that drag and drop editor in place. And even then you can probably add it on to the existing website that you have that website host that has a drag and drop editor.

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Now there is a scenario I highly recommend you build a custom website. And that's if you want your website and a software like a web app to totally integrate with each other. This is a very special case scenario if you're in the software industry, but it primarily allows people to log in and sign into your website and in your app at the same time. This requires you to be able to have one kind of integration and that needs customization. Now we do this with Webinar Ninja and it's sort of seamless, but having said that, we still have a separate sales website that that has our blog, our features, all that information, FAQs, all that kind of stuff, and uses one of those easy to use drag and drop Customize your own website builders. Why? Because I want to be able to add blog posts easily on the fly, change my features page or my sales page, ad pages. But when it comes to pages that people have to be logged into, I want to make sure that's part of the app, your checkout page, other pages that communicate with your actual software. In this case, you're going to need some customization and you're going to need a customized website to work with your app. If you're building a software anyway, you're probably going to have a designer and a developer on staff, at least one to help you with that. But if you're selling anything else, courses, content, coaching, bracelets, whatever it is, then having a custom built website, it's actually a lot more effort and time and money than it's worth. Especially if you're just getting started, especially even your first year, second year, the ball rolling, make some money, have a proof of concept. Make sure that you're focused on your product and your offering and the words on your website, the content, your website and not so much the design. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. Tomorrow we have another lesson and we're a daily show and it's Q and A Wednesday, where we answer a question from the audience. Tomorrow's Q and A Wednesday's question is how much time should I be spending consuming content, learning, reading, taking courses? I'll be answering that question tomorrow, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's easy to want to have a customized website and build it from scratch and see it as a big project. But you have to ask yourself an honest question. Are you doing that because you don't really want to open for business just yet? Because you want it to be just perfect? Because, hey, it's not perfect, then maybe you'll fail. The reality is your website is not really going to make or break your business. It's the service. It's what you offer, how you communicate it to others. I know that's a bit of tough love, but I wish I had that tough love when I was getting started because I would have saved a lot of time and money and effort. And a lot of tears, too. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care. Of.

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