Website builder or agency: the honest sum

There are businesses for which a website builder is the right decision, and it helps nobody to keep quiet about that. The typical pattern: one trade, one service radius, a full diary, no vacancy. The website then has to do essentially three things — say who works here, what gets done and how to reach the business. None of that requires parts a builder does not have.

What matters is less the tool than the person behind it. A builder holds up when somebody in the business still touches the site in year three: correcting opening hours, entering the works holiday, swapping in a new photograph. Without that person the site ages exactly like any other — except that nobody notices, because nobody feels responsible.

Anyone recognising their business in five or six of these points can safely start with a builder. The only important thing is to treat the decision for what it is: a decision about the current state of the business, not one for all time. Businesses grow, trades are added, and at some point the question comes round again.

An owner assembling a website at the kitchen table in the evening is working. Those hours appear in no calculation because no invoice corresponds to them. In business terms they are nonetheless the largest item of the do-it-yourself route — and the higher your own hourly rate, the more expensive the supposedly cheap way becomes.

The effort is distributed differently from what most people expect. Clicking the pages together is the smaller part. The time goes into the text: into working out what a service page should actually say, into wording rearranged three times, into photographs that looked fine on a phone and no longer do on a screen. Experience suggests many hours between the first evening and a version you are willing to show customers (project experience).

There is also an effect no table shows: people who built the site themselves change it less often. The barrier is not technical but internal — you know that every adjustment costs another evening, so the outdated service description simply stays. That, more reliably than the design, is how self-built sites give themselves away.

Every commercially used website needs a legal notice under section 5 of the German Digital Services Act and a privacy policy describing what the site actually does. A builder supplies at best a form waiting to be filled in — responsibility for content and accuracy stays with the business. The common workaround of copying the texts from another trade website carries that site's mistakes across as well.

With the contact form it becomes concrete: who receives the data, on what basis is it processed, how long is it kept? A privacy policy that matches the site answers those three questions, and one that matched a different site does not. This is not legal advice but a requirement on the text; assessing an individual case remains a matter for a lawyer.

On accessibility, a look at the statute helps against the widespread alarm. The German Accessibility Strengthening Act defines a micro-enterprise as one employing fewer than ten people with at most 2 million euros (BFSG) in annual turnover or annual balance sheet total. For micro-enterprises offering or providing services the obligation expressly does not apply — which covers the vast majority of trade businesses.

The most expensive moment of a builder site is rarely its construction but its end. Anyone wanting to switch after three years finds that design, structure and often the content cannot be taken along. What does travel is text and images — and only if somebody copies them out one by one.

It becomes genuinely painful with the addresses. Every subpage has an address that appears in directories, in reviews, in emails and in the memory of search engines. If those addresses change without proper redirects, the business loses visibility it spent years earning. That is repairable, but it costs — and it is often noticed only weeks later.

Anyone who knows this sequence before the first build decides differently. Not because a builder is bad, but because the exit belongs in the calculation. If you would like the routes weighed against your own situation, the shortest way is a short conversation via our contact page.

The decision can be made without relying on instinct, provided it is approached in the right order. Starting with the price leads to the wrong answer, because the price is only settled at the end. Starting with the purpose usually produces the answer by step three.

In practice the first three steps already give a clear picture in most cases. The 36-month calculation then merely confirms it — or corrects it at one point that had not been considered.

Anyone choosing the commissioned route should know beforehand what is in the price and what falls due monthly afterwards. A fixed price without a described scope is not a fixed price but an offer with a risk of additions. The scope therefore belongs in writing before the commission — page count, writing, image selection, legal pages, handover.

On this route the running items are hosting from 15 euros per month and website care from 49 euros per month, both cancellable monthly and without a minimum term. If findability is to be worked on as well, local visibility starts at 290 euros per month and search visibility at 490 euros per month, likewise cancellable monthly and without a minimum term. Questions on scope are best settled through our contact page.