Often, we get emails from our friends at smaller organizations asking “Can you help me build my website?” We wish Exygy could work with every amazing organization that comes our way, but we’ve grown to a point where we aren’t able to take on small projects successfully. So we have to say “no”.

Unless you’re a large organization we probably can’t help with your website project, but we can steer you in the right direction.

DIY Website Options

One option is to refer you to other smaller shops or to freelancers. Feel free to reach out and tell us a bit about your project — we’ll be happy to make some introductions to our friends and partners!

Unless you’re a large organization we probably can’t help with your website project, but we can steer you in the right direction.

Another option is to build your website yourself, using a website building platform. As with any “do it yourself” project, it can be easy to get started and do the basics — but it can be challenging to do it really well. Using the process we outline below, you’ll maximize your chances of success.

The goals here are:

• do it yourself
• low cost
• minimal headache
• relatively high quality results

What is a “Do-it-yourself website building platform,” and what are the limitations? 

These site building services are an alternative to the kind of “custom design and build” project that you would do with an agencies (like Exygy) or with some web designer / developer freelancers. To understand the limitations of a “do it yourself” platform it can help to understand how DIY differs from “going custom”.

In a “custom design and build” project you start with a blank canvas. You follow some of the steps below to understand your site/content architecture, and then you design from a whiteboard, to a digital canvas, and finally into a web page. In this type of project there are virtually no limitations on your content architecture or design, other than your imagination.

A DIY service will allow you to select a nice template and drop your content into that

In a DIY project, instead of designing something from scratch and then engineering a custom site skin based on the design, the DIY service will allow you to select a nice template and drop your content into that.

Using a prebuilt template presents challenges. You are no longer limited only by your imagination — you are limited by the constraints of the theme / template you have selected. More on that, below

Which DIY platform should I use?

This post is not an attempt to compare DIY platforms. You can find tons of reviews online. There are links to a few immediately below.

In this post, we’re suggesting you consider SquareSpace and/or WordPress.com

In this post, we’re suggesting you consider SquareSpace and/or WordPress.com. These are leaders in the DIY space. There are other options like Wix and Weebly, but we don’t feel these are as strong as SquareSpace or WordPress.com in most situations. That said, please do your research. The process below can be used for any DIY  platform. In fact, we recommend you understand your media and content architecture / IA *before* you start looking at DIY platforms.

The process:

A. Gather your media

“Media” can mean a lot of different things. In this case we mean:

• High quality images and videos
• Blog Posts or other content pieces you’ve done before
• Any existing marketing collateral (flyers, signs, print outs) – preferably in digital format, but get together whatever you’ve got.
• Any Identity / branding work you’ve done, or anything that reflects the identity / brand
• High Res Logo
• Content from your current website(s) (if available)

B. Define your Information Architecture / Content Outline / Site Map.

You want to try and answer these two questions:

1. what pages are there on the website?
2. what general content goes on each of those pages?Stay high level at this point — things such as “paragraph about the studio”, “paragraph about instructor XYZ”, or “list of classes”

As a process to get at answers to these two questions we suggest that you do the following:

• First, answer number one quickly, without much thought and without thinking about number two.
• Second, look around:

• websites for organizations exactly like yours, and not exactly like yours (if you’re an environmental non-profit, look at other environmental non-profits, as well as other general non-profits).Try and draw out — ideally on a piece of paper — the IA (#1 and #2 above) of one or two of the sites that you like. Doing this will help you understand (a) what IA is and (b) how other folks like you are thinking about IA for your type of organization.
• do the same for your old website(s) (if you’ve got ’em)

• Third, revise your original answer to number one with your new info in mind. At the same time, answer number two.

We suggest you do these in order: A before B. Your review of the materials in A will inform your work in B.

C. Begin reviewing possible site engines (DIY system) + and site templates (theme)

Once you’ve done A and B you’ll probably be pumped up to do C — it’s fun. As noted above, try and resist the temptation to do C first. It’s easy to get pulled in by shiny website themes and fall in love with one that you’re sure is “perfect for us.”

If you do this before you go through A and B above, you’ll find yourself having to force the answers to A and B (your IA and your media) into the IA and media buckets that your selected theme defines for you. Rather, you’ll be better served knowing what your IA and media are before you select a theme/site engine and using that knowledge as a lens as you select a DIY platform and theme.

Themes / templates often look fantastic with the demo content that the theme creator puts in there for off the theme. It makes sense: the theme developer / designer is often selling the theme, or wants folks to use their work for other reasons. They want it to look great so you’ll select it above the others.

You’ll be better served knowing what your IA and media are before you select a theme/site engine

Once you’ve selected it and you start to use it, you’ll find it’s hard to exactly map your buckets of content to the buckets of the content that are all fully populated in the example theme. You might have three images when the theme calls for four. You may have two sections instead of five on one page. You might have seven pages instead of three pages. These differences mean that it’s hard for your end result to look as good as the template you saw and fell in love with.

By knowing what your content is and what its architecture is, you can select a theme that not only looks good but also has a content architecture that closely resembles your own.

D. Look at similar orgs using the DIY platform you are considering

One other strategy for selecting a theme that will work for your sector / content architecture is to look at other websites for similar businesses and/or content architectures who are using the DIY website builder platforms. For example, if you’re a pilates studio and you’re interested in using Squarespace, look for other pilates studios that use Squarespace. This should be in some ways more informative then looking at the beautiful pre-built templates, because these show what an end result looks like.

If you’re a pilates studio and you’re interested in using Squarespace, look for other pilates studios that use Squarespace

Doing this exercise for Pilates Studios, I found some Pilates/Yoga studios using SquareSpace that have OK looking websites:

http://innaturalbodymovements.squarespace.com/

http://behotyogaatlanta.squarespace.com/

https://feelpilates.squarespace.com/

http://spencer-baker-4mbe.squarespace.com/#rates-policies

http://www.pilatesdurango.com/schedule/

These are decent. They’re no where near the quality of work I’d expect to come out of an agency like Exygy, but for a DIY project, you should plan to be happy with results of this quality. If that’s not acceptable, you may need to reconsider your strategy.

I found these by searching “Squarespace Pilates Studio” :

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=squarespace+pilates+studio

(I use DuckDuckGo, but Google should be fine too)

I also did the same search for WordPress.com. I found lots of Pilate Studio WordPress.com sites but didn’t come up with any OK looking ones — they all looked very dated. I suspect that’s because WordPress.com has been around so long so there are lots of older sites that rank highly. So the more modern looking sites may be buried in the search results.

SquareSpace is newer so may not have the same problem to the same extent. This is just a hypothesis. There certainly are some very nice looking WP.com themes (http://theme.wordpress.com/) You won’t find us hating on WordPress ever — we use it at Exygy every day. However, we don’t use WordPress.com (except for hosting some of our larger client sites on WordPress VIP… but that’s something very different).

At Exygy we use the open source WordPress software, customize and host it ourselves

At Exygy we use the open source WordPress software, customize and host it ourselves, rather then using the more “basic” WordPress.com “build it yourself” service. Sometimes people refer to this as “using WordPress.org rather than WordPress.com” but in reality this isn’t a very good description because we’re not really “using” WordPress.org. In any case, don’t worry about this too much — it’s not super relevant to a DIY project.

One consideration here is that a migration from WordPress.com to WordPress.org is pretty straightforward, so using WordPress.com vs. another DIY service does have WordPress.org as a “grow up someday” scenario (though this is certainly not the same as starting from scratch in a custom design and build project — so the advantage should not be overblown in the DIY platform selection process).

E. Write your content and build it

Fill in the IA buckets you created with real content. In parallel, begin dropping that content into the DIY platform / theme you selected.

F. Don’t stop with your website — it’s key to and the start of a digital marketing strategy, but it’s not the end-all-be-all

Other items for reflection:

• Marketing beyond the website:
  • Social Media, including Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, Google Places, Instagram, etc. etc. etc.

• Content Strategy:
  • Thinking about content as a two-fold opportunity for:
    • increasing inbound traffic to the site in general
    • positioning yourself as a thought leader, to open up new avenues for partnership and growth
  • Content may be generated
    • internally: yourself / your staff / hired copywriters
    • externally: folks outside your org, in your expert network who would like to guest post on your site

And so much more…

We hope this gets you started! Keep us in mind for your next big project: web, mobile, design, build — we do great digital, for good.

Have any tips to share about using DIY platforms? Process for doing it successfully? Questions about the difference between DIY and “custom design and build”? Please comment below!