topsites - 7:26 pm on Jan 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

I agree it's a royal pita, thou what I found frustrated me the worst is the copious amount of misleading and often outright false information concerning either the entire subject or parts of it.

You know: Build your own Website in 15 minutes - It's fast, easy, and free...!
And that's one of the more innocent ones.

As for some of the other stuff...
> you could have employed a web designer / developer to do the whole lot for you for very little cost and (if they have the experience!) they'll almost certainly have done a better job than you've done!

While some charge around 20 dollars a page, for a 200+ page site that would cost four thousand for starters. The next problem is, if you don't build it, you can't upgrade it / make changes and you always fork out more money. Last but not least, most site-builders' skills do not impress me.

> sadly thousands of business owners build their own websites then wonder why they don't make any sales .....

Sadder yet, thousands more pay someone else money, then wonder all the same.

A business that performs work for me usually takes the project out of my hands... For example when I take my car to a mechanic, the problem is fixed without further interaction from me. But then the problem is only a tiny piece of the whole car, and that leads to:
With web-design, I still have to provide a ton of stuff, there is so much work involved that hiring someone else is hardly practical, seeing how I have to do most of it myself, anyway.

And here begins the next problem... A designer who can do more than the 20-dollar/page guy usually also charges more, and suddenly I'm up to 100+ dollars/page in the deep, times 200 pages = 20 thousand dollars.

Although I can see where the designer's motivation comes from, I feel for that kind of money I had better have a site as good as google or msn.com and it better rank likewise, and for that matter I would rather pay after I see results. I understand this is unreasonable expectation, but then what is reasonable when the end result can not be predicted, and at least half the time turns out poorly?

So with hired designers it's like with reliable hosting, good luck finding one worth your hard-earned cash.

[edited by: topsites at 7:46 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2006]