One of the biggest influences on your decision will likely be cost. The expense of building your own website is going to be rather high when it comes to the number of zeros on the bill. There is no question that you will get what you pay for, but what you pay for also depends on precisely what you want from your website. There is no such thing as “one size fits all.” Perhaps you want to establish a website that is more on the complex side. Maybe you’re looking for page after page of displayable content, each with its own child pages that branch out and interact with other pages on your site.

In this case, you will probably want to contract outside help to keep your project from getting too crazy. It’s easy to start out with a simple task only to discover that it is a lot more involved than you originally thought. However, because you have to widen your funnel on the front end, you will need a substantial and robust blog. Your blog will need enticing and interactive graphics. You might need polls, a Disqus plugin, and a standout share bar, as well as CTAs splashed throughout each of your blog posts.

While you might know how to market your product, you could lack experience in developing a robust and beautiful blog. And building your blog is key to your success, so you will need a team that has had previous experience with gated content projects. In this situation it is far better to hire outside help than to handle everything on your own.

If you do decide to take the leap and construct your website on your own, then you should know that it will take time. Rome was not built in a day, and your website will not be either.

Building an entire website from scratch is tough, but worth it in the end. If you take the proper first steps, such as receiving a Java certification and training, you will streamline the time you spend working on your site.

Whether or not you decide to build your website by yourself or with an experienced web designer, you need to think of your site as a living thing that, much like you, can get sick.

“Getting sick” takes the form of overloading and crashing. Sometimes websites garner too much traffic for the server to support, and all that stress can cause the server to overload and crash. Other times, your coding (or your designer’s coding) might have a lapse that causes the site to crash. When these events happen—and they do more often than you think—you should have a solution that will enable you to get your site debugged. If you hired a firm, chances are they will jump on the problem immediately and take care of the issue for you. But if you built the site yourself, you should know what to do when it gets buggy.

There are website building platforms out there that allow you to get a free site simply by clicking a few times. But those platforms (such as WordPress, Joomla and Wix) tend to be very limited in terms of what they permit you to do. That is why having the ability to construct your very own site is such a great skill to have under your belt. You can fix any issues you might encounter on your own. You will save a ton of money in the long run, and you will also have the pride of crafting something amazing with your own two hands.