I want to preface this by acknowledging the deeply ridiculous nature of what I’m about to say.

I am a web developer. Building websites is literally what I do for a living. I have been doing it for over a decade. I have opinions about WordPress plugins the way some people have opinions about sports teams and I once spent an afternoon genuinely excited about a particularly elegant solution to a form field placeholder issue.

And I am here to tell you that building your own website — even if you’re capable of doing it — is not always the right call.

Let me explain.

The cobbler’s children problem

There is a very old expression about cobblers — the people who made and repaired shoes — whose own children had no shoes because they were too busy making shoes for everyone else. This phenomenon is so well-documented among professionals that it has its own cliché. Lawyers who haven’t updated their own contracts in years. Accountants whose personal finances are a mess. Therapists who don’t go to therapy.

And web developers whose websites are always, in some way, a work in progress.

I know what needs to be done. I know exactly how to do it. And there is something about working on the thing that is entirely yours — where every decision is yours, where every opinion you’ve ever had is available to second-guess you — that makes it genuinely harder than working on a client’s site.

When I’m building a website for you, I am solving your problem with your goals and your constraints in mind. When I’m building my own website, I am solving my problem while also being the client with opinions and the developer with perfectionism and the business owner with approximately forty-seven other things to do. It is a lot.

The time math

Here is the thing nobody mentions when they say “just build it yourself.”

Every hour you spend on your website is an hour you’re not spending on your actual business. Not just in terms of the time it takes — though that’s real — but in terms of the mental energy it takes. If you’re a florist and you spend four evenings trying to figure out why your image gallery isn’t loading properly on mobile, that is four evenings where you didn’t sleep, didn’t rest, didn’t think about the things that make your business actually good.

Your hourly rate, applied to your actual work, is almost certainly higher than a web developer’s hourly rate for the same number of hours. When I say “don’t let big companies tell you a website has to cost $5,000,” I’m not saying your time is worthless. I’m saying there’s a middle option between a $5,000 agency and the DIY spiral.

What DIY is actually good for

I am not going to sit here and tell you every small business owner needs a custom-built website. That would be untrue and also a transparent sales pitch.

DIY is fine when you have a very simple informational need, when you’re in the early days of a business and testing whether it’s viable before investing further, when you genuinely enjoy that kind of work and have the time for it, and when you are realistic about what the result will look like.

It’s less fine when you find yourself six hours into a tutorial rabbit hole at midnight having changed your mind about your color palette three times and googled “how do I center a div” even though you did that once in 2019 and feel like you should definitely still remember it.

(Nobody remembers how to center a div. This is a known human condition.)

The actual argument for hiring someone

The real case for working with a web developer — particularly one who charges hourly, is honest about scope, and isn’t trying to sell you services you don’t need — is not “you can’t do it yourself.” It’s that your time and cognitive energy are finite resources, and spending them on website building when that’s not your expertise is not always the best use of them.

And if accessibility matters to you — if you want your website to actually work for the range of people who might visit it — that’s genuinely harder to DIY well than most templates make it look.

I’m available to help at whatever level makes sense for where you are. Build the whole thing, just consult, fix a specific problem, get a second opinion — all of those are options. The consultation is free. Come figure out which version of help is actually the right size for what you need.

And if DIY is genuinely the right call for you right now, I’ll tell you that too. Weird business model, maybe, but I’d rather you trust me than buy something you didn’t need.