Building the website yourself (Wix, WordPress, templates): what nobody tells you beforehand
I have clients who tried it alone first. I'm not here to laugh at DIY: I'm here to tell you its full bill.
Building your own website with a visual builder is a legitimate option, and for some cases the right one: validating an idea, a hobby, an association with no budget. What isn't legitimate is how it's sold: "free" and "in one afternoon". Both are technically true and practically false. Here comes the full bill.
The visible bill and the invisible one
Visible: the plan you actually need (own domain, no ads, decent features) runs €20–40/month, forever. Invisible: your time. Thirty or forty hours learning the tool, wrestling the template and writing texts that don't carry your business — owner's hours, worth far more than the monthly fee. And in the end, most of those websites share three problems: they load slowly (lots of template code), they look like all the rest and nobody maintains them.
When to do it yourself and when not to
Do it yourself if: the budget is literally zero, the website isn't your customer channel, or you enjoy the process and have the hours. Don't do it if: your website must bring customers (then it's a work tool, not a hobby one), if you need serious features (bookings, languages, local SEO), or if your hour is worth more than the saving. The honest sum isn't "€600 versus free": it's "€600 versus 35 of my hours I no longer give my customers".
The question isn't how much the website costs: it's how much your hour costs when you spend it wrestling a template.
Still have a question?
Write to me and I answer you myself. Gerard — Barcelona, reply within 24 hours.