If you clicked on this link, it’s very likely you are…

• A new business in need of “web presence” (not to be confused with a website)
• An existing business with outdated, “I hate mobile” website coding.
• Have an OK website, but need an increase in “Web Presence” to get a leg up on competitors.

The Online DIY Website Builders spend millions on advertising (Wix and SquareSpace spent over $10 million during Super Bowl 50). Don’t get lured in…

Here are 6 reasons to avoid DIY website builders

• You can’t change templates. So you built a nice little Wix site yourself. Congratulations! You wrote all the content, uploaded all the images and videos, logos, etc. You spent a few nights slapping it all together, only to show it to someone who was subsequently, less than impressed. You looked through some other templates and saw a better one. Think you can use that without starting all over again? Think again. You can’t. Every time you change the look of your website, you need to start from the very beginning. Back to Square One. That frustration is one of the best reasons to avoid DIY website builders.  

• They advertise how easy it is, yet many give up, which is why Wix (and others) offer professional help for a “low fee”. You can find one of the Wix “approved designers” HERE. Please tell me you clicked, because if that is a professional site, I am now the world’s leading brain surgeon. Look, if you are going to pay someone, do it right the first time.

• “If it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist” is a quote from Jimmy Wales (a guy who founded a little site called Wikipedia) and it’s true. That Go-Daddy site with all the great pictures of your food, or images of you servicing vehicles, or videos of your pet grooming business? They don’t exist. Why? Go-Daddy actively blocks Google from indexing anything other than text. Hint: Any web designer/builder worth a buying a beer for, embeds the three important things Google looks for in a picture; title, alternate info and description, so they can index it (and link it on the web to your business) for search. That’s one of the big reasons to avoid DIY Website Builders, you’re really not on the web, you are on their domain. Let that sink in.

• Ali vs Frazier, the Jets and the Patriots, Google and Wix. History has given us a long list of great rivalries, and you can add Google/Wix to the mix. Google has a very tough time indexing Wix sites. So tough that Wix advises you to wait 90 days before you are indexed by Google. Reality Check: In the past, it could take Google up to 4 weeks to list your site. Much, much faster now. Someone tell Wix it’s 2016. If it takes 3 months for Google to crawl a Wix site, something is likely very, very wrong. And there is… just last fall, after an algorithm update, all the Wix-built sites vanished from Google. It got fixed (by Google), and no other real websites were affected, but it shows that Google Search has some real troubles with WIX. Wix tells you how much Google likes them though. Right. Sure they do. It’s also a very good reason to avoid DIY website builders.

• They all own your website and all the content, images, logos… One reason to avoid DYI website builders is they all own your website. Read the fine print. Here is a simple fact; If you hire someone to build a website, when it’s done, it’s yours free and clear. You can host it wherever you want. You can take it to someone else down the road for an overhaul…it’s yours. Not so with any DIY website. They own it, they can change it whenever they like (think about the changes over the years on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). You pay for the website for as long as you have it, and when you stop, it’s gone (think cable TV subscription). In reality, that’s not how it works, but as a caged rat, you do help them pay for Super Bowl ads….

• There’s this little thing that has exploded called content marketing. In a recent B2B survey, Content Marketing  was named as one of the top 3 business strategies by over 2/3 of business owners. You are locked out of Content Marketing. Why? Proper content marketing is heavily contingent on you having a blog/news/updates page on your domain as a subdomain, which is not possible on any DIY website builder.

The very biggest reason to avoid DIY website builders is because with all the work you put into it, not only is the SEO blocked, not only are there serious indexing issues, not only does the site look like it’s homemade, shopping cart limitations would take a whole new post, it’s not even that you don’t own the site…

The Biggest Reason to avoid DIY website builders?

It’s just a website. (and a bad one at that)

It’s just a website and that may have worked in the past, but in 2016, if you want to grow your online presence, you need to employ social media, SEO and most of all, inbound content marketing so you can truly tell your story directly to your target audience. Or embrace Wix, SquareSpace, Go-Daddy and all the rest; where SEO is stone-age, the websites look no better than what was common in AOL days, and they firmly lock you out of digital marketing efforts such as content marketing.

And that my friends, is the very biggest reason to avoid DIY website builders. They do absolutely nothing to increase your online web presence.