The honest answer? It depends on where you want your business to be in a year’s time.
You might expect a web design agency to tell you that you always need a professional. We won’t. Some businesses are better off with Wix or Squarespace for now, and we tell people that on the phone regularly.
But we also see the other side every week: businesses that spent months on a DIY site, got halfway, and came to us frustrated. They usually say the same thing at the end: “We wish we’d just hired you from the start.”
Here’s how to work out which camp you’re in.
If you’re a one-person business just starting out, DIY is often fine. At this stage you need a presence, not a masterpiece. A digital footprint of some kind is what matters.
Take a dog walker working on their own. They need a page with contact details, a few good photos and a way to get in touch. Wix or Squarespace can do that perfectly well, and the money saved can go elsewhere.
Some one-person businesses build something that looks great, and pick up real skills along the way. There’s no shame in that. And if all you need is a simple landing page, AI tools can now produce a decent first version in minutes.
DIY usually works when:
Things change once you’re an established business, you have staff, or you sell online.
A story we hear a lot goes like this. The managing director looks at a website builder and thinks, “How hard can it be?” The job lands on the operations manager, who has no marketing or digital background. Months later, the site is half-built, he’s frustrated, and the business wants someone to take it off his hands.
When they finally look at our prices, the maths is uncomfortable. Add up the hours that manager spent away from his actual job, and hiring us would have been cheaper.
E-commerce is the other big trap. It’s easy to set up an online shop the wrong way. It works fine at first, then can’t scale when orders pick up.
The root issue is simple. Whether you’re a dog walker or an accountant, you don’t look at websites all day. You don’t follow web trends, and you don’t think about user experience. We do, every day.
The giveaway is that half the site looks great, and that’s the half the template designed. The other half is where the owner tried to change things. Broken layouts, odd spacing and sections that don’t quite line up show exactly where the edits happened.
The issues that cost you business are usually ones you can’t see:
This is one of the most common questions we get, and the answer usually disappoints people.
Template builders like Wix have hard limits on what you can change. A professional designer wants to move freely, and the template often won’t let us. So “start on Wix and get a pro to polish it later” rarely works the way people hope.
Even switching platforms involves trade-offs. One client moved their shop to Shopify for all the right reasons: it was more scalable and traffic was growing. But they lost some design features they could have had with WooCommerce. That was a compromise they had to weigh up.
That’s why, when a business outgrows its DIY site, we normally recommend a rebuild. Not to tidy up the old one, but to give you a site that grows with you, so you’re not facing the same problem in two years.
We recently worked with a growing professional services firm. Their site looked dated, but that wasn’t the real problem. They weren’t ranking for a single keyword that mattered to them.
What we did:
The result: the site now ranks for the keywords the business actually wants.
None of this was glamorous. It was the basics, done properly. But get those basics right and they make a huge difference, and a layperson usually can’t see them.
We’d rather show real numbers than say “it depends”. Here’s what we charge:
| Package | What you get | Starting price |
|---|---|---|
| Launchpad website | Custom-designed homepage, carried through a 5-page site, first year of hosting included | £1,250 + VAT |
| E-commerce website | Custom online shop, built to scale | £1,600 + VAT |
Both can be spread out: pay a deposit, then the rest in instalments over 6 months. You don’t need a lump sum sitting in your marketing budget.
GoDaddy, Wix and similar builders are cheaper upfront, and that low first-year price is the hook. After that, costs tend to climb every year. And you still end up with a template that thousands of other businesses use, not a site designed around yours.
For a one-person business getting started, that’s a fair trade for year one. For an established business, compare our price with the hours your team would spend building it. That’s usually where the decision makes itself.
“It’ll take months.” We typically build a site in 2 to 3 weeks. The sooner it’s live and ranking, the sooner it brings in customers. Ironically, it’s the DIY route that so often takes months.
“It’ll eat my whole marketing budget.” With a deposit and 6-month instalments, it’s a manageable monthly cost, not one big hit.
“I’ll be stuck paying them forever, and I’ll never be able to reach them.” We build on a content management system, so you can make most changes yourself. We offer service level agreements, but only to clients who actually need one. If you’re just making basic updates, you probably don’t.
What you do get is a team available 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. Too many web designers build a site and then disappear, leaving clients unable to make a simple change. When our clients get stuck with something small, we usually just help, free of charge. Bigger jobs are quoted when you need them.
If you decide to hire help, don’t choose based on emails alone. Speak to a real person, ideally on a video call, or better still over a coffee.
Most people commissioning a website are busy and have never done it before. They need guidance, and that takes trust. Why would you put your faith in someone you don’t know from Adam?
On that first call, find out:
Pay attention to what they ask you, too. A good designer will want to know about your business, your customers and where you want to be in a year. That’s not small talk; that’s the brief.
| DIY is probably fine if… | It’s time for a professional if… |
|---|---|
| It’s just you, and you’re starting out | You have staff, or you’re growing fast |
| You need a simple contact page with a few photos | You need the site to win enquiries or sales |
| You have time to learn the tool | Someone on your team is losing weeks to it |
| Online sales are small or not yet started | You’re selling online and need to scale |
| Google rankings aren’t a priority yet | You need to be found for specific keywords |
Not every website needs a web design agency. There are some genuinely good website builders out there. What matters is that your site is fit for purpose, now and in a year’s time.
The quickest way to find out is a conversation. Some agencies charge for every second you’re on the phone. We don’t. We’ve given free advice to plenty of local businesses, and even fixed small things on their sites, simply because we wanted to help.
If a website builder is the right place for you to start, we’ll tell you. If you’ve outgrown it, we’ll tell you that too.
Give Say Web Design a call or pop in for a coffee here in Newquay, and let’s work out what your business actually needs.
