Build your own Website, or Hire a PRO?

Nowadays, building a website isn’t rocket science. That’s right we said it, let all of the high-priced web designers roll their eyes and sigh. At North Georgia Web we have been building and marketing business and niche websites for Aunica Media for over 20 years, so we know what we’re talking about. With the explosion of ready-made templates and drag-and-drop web builders like our WebDawg Builder, building websites has never been easier!

With a little up-front money, some trial and error accompanied by a fair amount of Googling, most people can build and publish their own website. However, there are a lot of other nuts and bolts that go into publishing a successful website besides the actual building of the site.

These are:

• API services
• Google Search Console
• Google Business Manager
• XML sitemaps
• Analytics … and a host of other connective concerns that go into a modern website these days.
• SMTP Mail connectivity

The thing is, every day we hire professionals to do tasks that, if we put our minds to it, we could probably do for ourselves. However when you hire a pro not only will you skip the chore, time and aggravation, you’ll know that the job was done correctly and will stand the test of time. After all, it’s not like small business owners have a lot of spare time on their hands, right?

Budling a website is akin to building a house; it’s never as cheap as you originally planned. The web, as it relates to web development, is generally free or very cheap to get set up to build a website. However, that is where the charity ends because those “free” themes and plugins all have upgrades that you must purchase to get the full functionality of the plugin. About half of these plugins you can run the free versions and not have to upgrade, but the themes and specialty focused plugins will need to be purchased on an annual basis to run a specialized website, e.g. an Ecommerce store.

You will probably need or want a premium theme because all of the “free themes” are desperately wanting, as well as premium plugins that add the extra functionality. You will need to consider licensed images, because the images that come with themes are generally not included in the price.

All of these items and areas must be tweaked so that Google and Bing can easily find and index the website is just as critical, or even more critical, than building a nice looking website. We call it “making the trains run on time.”

These are:

• Web hosting
• DNS management
• Domain management
• SEO optimization
• Schema markup
• Caching for server speed
• CSS, and HTML validation and much more.
• Social media connectivity
• Google My Business

Why Use North Georgia Web?

Because we can, in most situations, design your project for less money than the competition while doing a better job. So, the next logical question is: “Why are you guys cheaper?”

North Georgia Web is owned by Aunica Media LLC, a web publishing company that in its height, published and managed well over a hundred websites. In 2012 we sold the publishing end of our business and all of our revenue producing web properties and semi-retired in Ellijay Georgia.

In retirement we learned that we did not miss the business-end of the publishing business, but we did miss the creative-end of the business. We missed that feeling we would get from taking a single idea and transforming it into something that is both meaningful and beautiful. Something that has a purpose, form and function. In short, we missed building websites.

So, we opened North Georgia Web …

In our opinion, the main reason web design is so expensive is because everyone is specialized to a specific niche of the web design process. For example, most design agencies will reference “our design team” when quoting a job or marketing their business. The problem with the word “team” is not the aspect of a team working together, it’s the fact that they MUST have a team in order for them to build a website.

In today’s era of specialization you have front-end designers, back end coders, graphic designers, video editors, JavaScript gurus, CSS & HTML gurus, IT and server support services and more. The problem with this is:

Generally speaking, people in these positions usually only function in THAT specific position. Nowadays, asking a “front-end” person to work on “back-end” issues, is analogous to going to an podiatrist for a sore throat. Meaning, most of the larger comap-naies that we compete with have a “team” because it LITERALLY takes a team to build a functioning website.

At North Georgia Web we do 95% of all of our projects in-house. This is because we are the “the team.” North Georgia Web is ran by two experienced web developers who can complete almost every aspect of the web design process from start to finish. We don’t need a team of high priced specialists making $60 hour to do the things that it takes to get a website up and running. We can do it cheaper, simply because we can.