When to build your own website

In the last topic we talked about the ultimate determinants of e-business. We got to know that we should never forget the basics when doing whichever type of business. From now on, I'm going to discuss each small topic with you. Today's topic is: When should we consider building our own website.

When asked why they built their own website from scratch, the answers are always among the followings:

• More flexibility w.r.t design and ad placement
  
• Many open source CMS systems such as joomla make the building of website a piece of cake
  
• With a feeling that independent website can always earn more money than free host such as blogs, wiki and other free hosting providers.
• Others

However, none of the answers listed above ensure that building our own website is a wise decision, that is, will bring us much more return than if we continue to use secondary domain name with free host. Actually, nowadays, bloggers and wordpress are quite effective cash engine for webmasters. You could customize your design. You could almost freely place your ad anywhere in your pages. You could do link building. You could play with social bookmarking. What's more, you could take advantage of some blogging technique, such as auto pinger, to greatly reduce promotion efforts required.

So what on earth determines whether we should consider building our own website? Well, it depends on the competitive advantages of independent website compared with free host service. In my view, the competitive advantages of independent website include the followings:

• Serve as news, company or some other organizations' portal.
  
• Provide service, such as search engine, web directory, blogging, forum, social network service (SNS), and other sorts of service that demands member registration
• E-commerce
• Others...

As you could see, I didn't mention exhibiting unique content as one of the competitive advantages of website. Why? In my view, if you have unique content, putting your content in a blog provided either by wordpress or blogspot is enough for you to achieve as least the same result as if you build your own website. In many cases, the return ensured by free blogs is much higher than independent websites. The reason might include:

• Independent website is more likely to have more general content, which is less friendly to advertising network. On the other hand, blogs usually have a narrow topic on which all the articles are centered.
  
• Independent website is much harder to optimize given the huge workload of an entire site, whereas with a blog you simply need to care about your articles, domain name, and some titles naming.
  
• You have do all on your own for your own website, whereas blogs usually have a lot tools or widgets for you to take advantage of.

In brief, it's very important to think twice before we decide to build an independent website at a certain moment. I made a lot of mistakes in the past because of blind website obsession. I sincerely hope, after reading this article,  you my dear friends, and I as well, could do a better job in future when we need to make a decision on when to build our own websites.