This is a common question we are asked – and it’s also a fair enough question! There are a large range of high quality “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) programs which can help you get online in no time and at a fraction of the cost.

Given the high quality of these programs, you might be wondering, in 2021 what does a website company like Prudent Pixel do? Surely we don’t just compete with these low cost services? Well in many ways we do and we don’t. The WYSIWYG services that are available are indeed good, but they have their limitations.

Firstly – You still have to do it. Although these systems aim to make things simple, they still require the time for you to sit down and create your website. That might be a good thing if you want fine control over the content of your website, but sometimes it helps to speak to those who do these kinds of things day in day out. We know what kind of content is going to get strong responses from search engines, and we will encourage you to get things done if you “put it off for today”. After all, with our CMS based websites, you can always go and “finesse” the content when you get time, we help get you online in the mean time!

Secondly – you are often locked in. While the final product from these services can look great, more times than not, they are using their own proprietary software to create these websites. This works and creates a good final product, but you can find when you want to start adding features, that suddenly you have to pay the original company either a lot of money, or essentially start your website all over again (And thus pay another company to rebuild your entire website!). Companies such as Prudent Pixel create code – so more frequently than not, we are able to share the code and, another developer could continue working. Especially if your website is based on a common platform such as WordPress or Umbraco. This ensures our pricing remains competitive, as we don’t lock you into our platform.

Finally – you might be limited with extensions. At Prudent Pixel we build either using a well established backend (such as WordPress or Umbraco), or create well documented code, it is very easy to extend the sites we build. This means that if you decide to integrate your website either with an existing system, or even a system in the future you haven’t thought of yet, it’s much easier to do that without hitting any limitations. We even have access to the backend of the database should this ever be required. (Hint: it basically never is the way we need to do things!) The complete transparency and open sourced nature of the work we do means that we can integrate with anything – existing or in the future! This is not always the case with proprietary software. There have been times when adding a tiny bit of functionality has meant recreating the entire website in an open source platform (which guess what, means you are paying the same cost as doing this in the first place all over again!)

So when my friends ask me – “Do companies that let you make your own website online really compete with your business?”, I tend to tell them that they don’t really, they are great alternatives, but a lot of the time we find people don’t want to have to think about creating and maintaining their websites – and so they turn to the Customer Centric Software Developers. That’s us, we take the hassle out of building and maintaining your website!