Drawbacks Of Running Your Own Website
For starters, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) parameters keep changing.
After Google Penguin, Google Panda and Google Humming Bird it is nearly become a job for the
experts or we have to constantly be doing online training courses to keep up
with the latest information, which is often not easy to find as there are a lot
of “scammers” out there who claim to do the work for you but then don’t.
Such as Premisoftware in India who we paid to build a website for us that they scammed us for and then had it hacked so that we lost the whole lot and even the Hosting company wouldn't have our site on their servers. Beware - NEVER EVER use this company - they were not even able to fix their own mistakes nor the problems they created in building a very poor WordPress site that we never agreed to!
We Can Hardly Take A Day Off
We have found ourselves having to work seven days a week, as even on
weekends we need to watch for any technical issues that may have occurred with
customers placing orders. Then dealing with technical issues can take
days, weeks and months to get resolved. These are mainly out of our
control as they are to do with the company who hosts our website and the store
builder template.
Because our website is on a template driven system (not recommended by
most experts), this means that glitches in their software cause technical
issues at random and these happen regularly, which are beyond our control.
We spend many hours each month dealing with our online help desk getting
these resolved. Some have never been fixable at times. Also, parameters set up in their software cannot be changed or updates, such as setting up attributes to images, which became a requirement in Google last year which has further reduced our rankings as these cannot be changed in some places.
Hence we attempted to have Premi Software India to build an new one for us on a better platform which we agreed to, and they ended up building us a very poor cheap website on WordPress which was NOT in the contract that we signed.
Customers Expect Us To Always Be Available
Our customers expect us to be available 24 hours per day 7 days per
week, and often get upset when we do not respond on weekends or after hours. We
have had to be very specific with setting our work hours and often work three
to four hours per day longer than we plan to.
Customers overseas expect us to respond on Saturdays, as it is still
Friday in their countries, so we usually end up working on Saturday mornings.
Difficulty Taking Holidays
If we go away on holiday, we have to take computers with us and constantly
be checking emails, processing orders and responding to customer enquiries.
We also need to take stock with us to
fill website orders while we are away. This is not always easy, as when we are
in other countries we have to pay different postal charges and items can take
even longer to be delivered. Some items are too large to carry, although
we can get these drop shipped.
