Hire a Web Designer Or Go it Alone?

If you want your website and your business to make money, you need to decide whether or not you want to do it on your own or get some help from a web designer. Before you think that you'll do it alone, be sure to stop and think again. There is much more to an internet business than simply designing a website, and in order to be successful you have to make sure that you understand all of the moving parts involved.

In order to take your website and turn it into something that makes money you need to know how to do several things:

• process payments on your website, including credit card payments.
• keep track of your money
• ship your products
• gather more clients.
• build and maintain your website.
• capture email addresses.
• stream audio and video
• split test your pages to increase conversions
• track website traffic and analyze your website stats.

You can hire all of this stuff out for about 50 - 100 dollars an hour. However, even if you have only a little experience you should be able to figure out how to learn the things that you need for yourself, and get it done on your own. If you are going to learn, there are several things that you need to make money online:

• a good web hosting account
• a website builder
• an email auto responder
• traffic tracking software
• split testing application
• a merchant account

Remember, building and maintaining a website is something that just could take you several months to learn. You will also need to put in a lot of work to make sure that your business is successful, online and offline. Make sure that you follow the basic rule of spending no more than 10 percent of your time on the technology, and the rest on getting traffic to your website, and converting that traffic into money.

If you think that you can't handle it on your own, and you don't have the money for a website designer, there are still ways to get around it. You can find a complete "internet business in a box application" and use it to get yourself set up and started. This can save you a lot of money, and it can also save you a lot of time because it will truly allow you to do it all on your own.

Still not sure if you want to hire a web designer or do all the tech stuff yourself? Please visit my hub page entitled Do It Yourself, or Hire A Web Designer?