Who among us does everything.. from concept to finished product? Site concept Designing the site Programming the Site Promoting the site I've done it all with varied results. I find the concept and promotion the hardest things. Design and programming come fairly easily. Coming up with strageties to promote (with tiny budgets) hasn't been easy. How many of you outsource/partner up a significant part of your overall website/online business?
I specialize in minisites.. sites with only 3 or 4 pages, so it is easy to do it all. Most difficult part is thinking about what kind of site to build.. every idea seems to be taken by 1,000,000 people already
ATM I do most of it myself though I do buy content. In the future I will out source more and more, as much as is financially viable.
I do it all though I couldn´t say I programmed anything. I had an idea for a site, designed it in Front Page (yeah, yeah, I know) and filled it with content. Uploaded and ... Bob´s your uncle. That´s it. I have no budget at all for marketing and have never paid for a link or any on or off-line advertising. Still, the marketing of the site has been okay. It´s been up for long enough to have bit of its own momentum now.
Yeah - pretty much do it all from the ground up. Site, templates, content, graphics, some exceedingly simple php hackage then lots of publicising. It's flamin' addicitive. The content bit is the bit I enjoy most, and at the moment its having good effect, slowly and surely.
Also create/design and promote the sites myself. Lots of work but great fun. Just started working with wordpress, I'm amazed by the simplicity of the script, first design is up but already thinking about a new design..
I do most things myself because I can guarantee the quality of the work will be good. Content I outsource sometimes, just because I don't like having to write it. Design, Build and Promotion is done by me though
I find the content/link building to be the worst parts of the overall project. They are very time consuming and tedious. I actually love designing, photographing, coding, programming and doing database designs. When it comes time to start writing content I get a lot less motivated and sluggish... about that time I have a new idea for a new site I want to start... lol. Right now alone, I have at least 15 different big projects I'm working on. Also when it comes time to start building links and try to get sites ranking.. very frustrating. Build links.. wait... build links... wait... I HATE waiting on search engines to spider/rank my sites almost as much as I hate writing content I would love to figure out a way to just build the sites and sell them for enough to live comfortably ... and never worry about the damn SE side of things.
At work I do everything, but that's about to change because we're hiring a graphic designer so I can focus on other projects. I would agree that link building takes the most amount of time, so I side-stepped that by building a script to get links for me It was working for a while, then we shifted our focus onto high quality link building rather than just quantities and I'm still rewritting the code for it lol. I love designing sites, but I don't have the time. In the 8 hours it takes to get a concept, build a mockup, then build an html template, I could have focused on alot of other tasks that were more important. Generally I find it's easier to build a site with a poor design, get the content flowing so the search engines notice it, and then come back to it in 6 months after it has developed some pr and give it a really awesome design. Programming a site does wonders. For example, I'm in the middle of building a script which will automate a book website. It gathers content from specific sources, formats it appropriately, and then posts it to a content management system. The site has already been spidered, and it pushes traffic to amazon like crazy Took about 20 hours of work to get it going, but now I barely touch it, I'm just making some minor tweaks before it is finished.
I do the same thing, I often throw up crap designs with some junk content, when I get an idea, then once the site has some pr and some visitors I re-design it
I do most of the stuff for sites, I do all the programming and coding, but I sometimes pay people for graphics work as that is my shortcoming. Otherwise it's all me, marketing isnt my strong point yet either, but I am learning that here at DP
Do it myself also. It is hard with tiny budgets and I have a rule that I will never spend more money on websites than what I have earned from them. That is why my very first site was hosted on a free server and had one of the cheap subdomain domain names. But I managed to earn a bit from it and used that money to register good domains and make more sites. It is a slow process but it worked and now I earn way more than what I spend on domain registeration and hosting.
I do everything for my own sites. Same for my customers, except they provide their site content. I usually "massage" the content lightly for seo purposes.
I do it all myself. I have used some existing scripts on a couple sites. But when I have not doing everything from scratch I feel like I have less control of the site. So any site that I really care about I will make sure to do every aspect myself.
I do a lot on my sites but not everything. When it comes to marketing, we hired a PR firm a long time ago. Well worth the money IMHO.
I do everything myself, mainly as the web sites in question are for myself. So design, graphics (you will notice no graphics as I am hopeless in that area), code, content and PR. This is why I have 3 web sites on the go at the moment