Stepping on Legos can be pretty painful. Building a website, although not physically painful, can leave you screaming four-letter expletives too. The Lego Star Wars Millennium Falcon comes with 7,500 pieces and instructions, just like DIY websites can be built with “easy” drag and drop features and plenty of tutorials available on YouTube. Like Legos, experts design the website templates and tutorials, so of course, building a website is easy for them.
Building a Lego Millennium Falcon is impressive and a fun challenge, but it won’t increase your sales or customer base. And the time and effort you invest are for your pleasure, so your business doesn’t depend on its success.
If you want to educate yourself and enjoy the challenge of creating a website, then the time, research, and frustration are well worth the effort. I love building new websites, but it is an ongoing learning process. Platforms are continually updating and creating new tools that are supposedly faster and easier than the previous ones. Web designers take the time to learn them because that’s our job.
Anyone can take a bunch of Legos and construct a simple building, car, or structure, but you don’t want to apply the same principle to your website. Your website should reflect your brand and style. It should not look like something pieced together using whatever colors, shapes, and blocks inspired the template designer.
Lego provides clear pictures of how your finished project will look. Your website, on the other hand, is a shot in the dark. Do you have a clear image of how you want your finished website to look, or are you going to wing it and be surprised with the final result? Will you like it, or will you have to start all over and rebuild it?
With Lego sets, you can tear down your project and rebuild it anytime you find a mistake or step on the missing piece you’ve spent hours looking for. Is that really how you want to approach building a website? Personally, I’d rather step on a Lego. It’s much easier to create a new website than to try and redesign or fix construction errors after the fact.
Usually, the pain from stepping on a Lego is short-lived. The stress from a DIY website can last for months or become an ongoing project that you’re never quite happy or satisfied with. Finishing touches, updated pictures, new plugins or widgets can consume more time than you anticipated. That’s fine if you don’t have customers trying to find you on the internet. And since the Lego piece you step on is usually the one you’ve been looking for, perhaps the missing piece you need for your website is a graphic designer.
