A Designer’s Prerogative: Why I Don’t Design Websites with Squarespace or Wix

Pretend for a moment that you are completing some repairs on your home. Your front door is in desperate need of a new coat of paint. It was red but it has faded. You’re sure you have some beautiful paint in the garage from when you repainted the trim in the dining room. You check, and sure enough, you have just enough paint for one coat on the door. There are a couple of problems with using this paint, though.

The first problem is that you don’t have enough for a second coat, and you’re afraid it might need it since the current paint color is so much brighter than the new paint. The second problem is that it isn’t exterior paint.

But, you don’t have enough time to go to the paint store, pick a color, have it mixed, drive home, and then paint your door and wait for it to dry so you can remount it before you need to leave for an important evening out.

Your options are:

1. Use the beautiful paint you have and hope that it covers the old paint and stays on, or
2. Get the right paint another day and leave your janky-looking door alone for today.

You decide to go with option 1 and begin painting.

Much to your delight, once you’re done, your door is beautiful! It’s absolutely gorgeous and you can’t believe it turned out so well. You give yourself a pat on the back and go on about life.

Fast forward a week later. You come home to discover there’s a scratch in your new paint. You can clearly see the old paint.

Fast forward another week or two and you start seeing little flakes of your beautiful paint on the porch—it’s slowly peeling and flaking off your door.

For me as a professional website designer, Squarespace, Wix, or any other site-builder is like that beautiful paint. It’s appealing to use because it seems like the simplest option, but in the long-term, it isn’t.

Beauty is More Than Skin Deep

The DIY site-builders can produce beautiful, super easy-to-achieve results. But as with everything, beauty is more than skin deep. A site’s guts, the back-end stuff that makes it do what it does on the surface, needs to be flexible enough to expand with your business. It needs to be built in a way that allows for the best possible search engine results page rank. It needs to be responsive and functional across the board so that it doesn’t matter what device or browser your potential client is using to surf the internet.

Limited Functionality and Customization

That beautiful site offers beauty and simplicity, but limited functionality and customization. My hands are tied if it doesn’t do exactly what you’d like it to do, or if it doesn’t look precisely how you’d like it to look. I can only do what the theme allows me to do, which is exactly the same as what you can do. It would be like a professional painter coming to your house to paint your door, using the beautiful interior paint you have in the garage, with the same end result (scratches easily, paint flaking and peeling). I refuse to charge someone to build something that was intended for the Do-It-Yourselfer; something that can be easily achieved by anyone else.

Reliable, SEO-Friendly, Mobile-Responsive, & Completely Unique

My focus is on building a reliable, SEO-friendly, mobile-responsive site that will withstand the test of time, and is completely unique for your business. The long-term functionality, SEO capabilities, customization, and reliability that comes with building a site using a developer’s platform wins out every single time over Squarespace, Wix, or any other site-builder.

If you’d like to see what I’ve built, take a look at my portfolio. There might be one site you really like, or several, but every site there was completely customized to function and look exactly as my customer wanted. Exactly. You can’t get that with Squarespace or Wix.