It’s a fact that many small businesses either can’t afford to pay a web designer for the work they require, or don’t perceive the value in that work. If this describes you, then frankly you are between a rock and well, another rock.

You want your site to earn you money, so someone, either you, your web designer, an employee or that gullible technical friend of yours has got to spend many hundreds of hours working on varying aspects of your site over a long period of time. Anyone can create a web site in a weekend that no-one visits, but no-one can create a website in a weekend that makes money.

If you can’t afford to pay someone else to work the long continued hours required, or you don’t want to, you either have to settle for a worthless (possibly quite pretty) web site, or you can learn how to do the work yourself. You may as well get used to the idea.

If you’ve the capacity to learn, your web designer can get you started by creating a simple layout for you to work with. Thereafter you are free to take responsibility for your own site, only calling on your web designer/friend/relative to help when you’re stuck, or when you need something technical added.

It’s a hard road, but one that can pay off in the end. In my opinion, unless you aspire to a site that practically no-one visits, or you have enough money to pay a professional person to do the work for you, learning at least the rudiments of web design, graphic design and traffic generation are essential.

Further, any web site that is capable of generating meaningful income will need many, many hours of dedicated work on an on-going basis, to build, maintain and promote. If you have no budget to pay someone else, let’s face it, the person working late into the night for next to nothing (until the site starts to generate income), will have to be you.