About once a year, I ship my (now teenage) daughter off to spend a week with her grandparents on the other side of the mountains.
I don’t know what it is about that blissful stretch of freedom, but every single year when she’s gone, I get an itch to embark on some kind of DIY project.
One year it was reorganizing my closet. One year, it was doing a massive purge of her old toys (which was so much easier to do while she was gone, but to this day, she still holds it against me).
This year, I decided to refinish my 20 some-odd year old kitchen table.
Now…I love this table.
It fits our home and our family perfectly. But the finish had worn off in places; it was starting to pick up water rings; it had semi-permanent marker and paint stains from The Toddler Years; and the wood was discoloring. So it was time to give it some TLC.
I’ve done a grand total of one refinishing project in my lifetime and came to the conclusion that they are a giant pain in the you-know-what.
So it’s been a while.
But I thought to myself, “I’m just redoing the tabletop – not the base and legs. No tricky nooks and crannies to spend hours upon hours trying to strip. How bad can it be? Right?!”
I thought it was going to take a day and a half tops.
If you’re a DIYer yourself, you probably know how this story ends.
So I totally get the desire to build something yourself, even – or maybe especially – when it comes to your own website.
DIY-ing a website is actually how I stumbled into my own web development business – trying to puzzle and pick my way through creating a site for an oatmeal business my husband and I had quite a few years back.
That website was a long, painstaking labor of love trying to figure out how to buy the domain name, how to get hosting, how to design it, how to build it, how to manage it once it was built, and on and on and on.
For me, that litany of technical and design details turned out to be a challenge I fell in love with.
But for many folks, I can see how it could be as aggravating as trying to make stain come out not-blotchy on what looks like a perfectly clean and smoothly sanded oak tabletop. (Urghhh.)
Despite knowing at the outset that a DIY project is going to take me three times as long as I originally plan and lead to serious aggravation at some point along the journey, I end up doing it anyway.
If that’s your natural inclination, too, man…I’m right there with you.
So I thought I’d share a few table-refinishing lessons that might help you along the way with your DIY website.
LESSON #1 – Know where you’re going and have a pretty clear path laid out for how you’re supposed to get there.
I don’t do much (any) woodworking or furniture refinishing, but from a smidge of past experience, a good bit of internet research, and talking through the process with my husband, we did have a fairly clear idea of the order things needed to happen in. And every morning when I woke up, I would reiterate, out loud, what my next step in that process was and think through the ramifications of the step I was about to do.
Websites are the same way.
There is a definite order needed to bring one to life.
And I’ll tell you flat out, if you start trying to drag and drop things onto a page and fill in the content as you go, you’ll end up in a world of hurt. That’s like trying to apply varnish before you’ve let the stain set. It’s going to turn into a sloppy mess.
But if you do the prep work – clarity around your message and writing your content – before you start in on the pretty, fun stuff, you’ll end up with something much more cohesive in the end.
LESSON #2 – Don’t paint yourself into a corner
As we were deciding what color to stain the table, one of the things we took into consideration was how easy it would be to change if we ended up hating it. So that led us to choose a lighter rather than darker stain because it left us more room to make a different decision if it didn’t turn out how we liked.
So don’t gloss over opportunities to be flexible and leave yourself room to adjust later when you’re creating your website.
When I’ve helped folks recover from their DIY website disasters in the past, this is one of the biggest issues we’ve run into – the template they used left them no room to go back and add client-winning things like an email optin form or fresh content like blog posts.
And oftentimes, ‘fixing it’ meant starting from scratch.
Make sure what you create is flexible enough to grow with you and your business.
For a more in-depth discussion about DIY vs. Professionally Designed Websites…
I was just interviewed for the Prosperous Coach Podcast by the indomitable Rhonda Hess, a longtime and very dear client. She and I had a down-to-earth conversation about the perils and pitfalls of DIY-ing your own site where we talk about what makes a client-winning website and so much more. Be sure to check it out at ProsperousCoach.com/45.
My table, by the way, turned out beautifully.
I love where I ended up with it. But, as you probably guessed, it took so much longer and cost quite a bit more to get there than I anticipated.
Sometimes that journey is worth it and you can take the time to futz around with your DIY and make the mistakes.
But sometimes, especially when you’re done with futzing and ready to get serious, a little professional help can make a huge difference.
