There are an awful lot of free tools out there at the moment that allow anyone to design their own website and pop it online, but most of these tend to product feature laden sights built with flash or templates that look largely the same and are poorly search engine optimised, meaning they may be fine for personal sites to show off pictures of your kids and cat but are unlikely to be any real use as marketing websites for real businesses.

An increasing number of marketing managers are attempting to bring website design and development in house in order to save money, but lack of experience and expertise can result in a false economy that leaves you with many thousands of pounds worth of staff hours lost to build a site which looks unprofessional and performs poorly.

If you are giving serious consideration to bringing you web development in-house, stop and take stock first of your available skills, what you require your website to do, the kind of image you want to project online for your company and – this is the one which is often forgotten – the amount of time you have at your disposal to actually build a website.

Key Website Building Skills

• HTML and CSS knowledge in order to actually code up your website. This can only be offset a little by having a good piece of software, as the web design tools that give the best results are not designed for the layperson and a modern website simply cannot be effectively coded up using notepad these days!
• Good artistic ability. Don't think because you've designed your own greetings cards this year that you are ready to tackle a website project. You need a good eye for colour, some grasp of design psychology for your target audience and generally good taste in order to create a website that will appeal to a broad range of users rather than just your short sighted mum.
• Photoshop or other graphic software experience. You will need to be able to create good looking, high resolution photographs and other site graphics including icons and banners, as well as optimise these for rapid load speeds on your website. Being able to draw something with your tablet in MS Paint does not count.
• Navigation and user interface design. Understanding how people interact with and move through a website is critical for good menu design and implementation as well as putting your site content on in a sensible fashion. People don't work like filing cabinets – you need to understand online behaviour to do this well.
• Programming expertise. That's right, you won't just need HTML and CSS for your website. If you want interactive tools, forms and other rich user experience features you may well need JavaScript, PHP, SQL or a range of other programming languages at your fingertips to avoid making a site that can be hacked by a first year CompSci student.
• Online marketing experience. At the end of the day your website is supposed to be a marketing tool, not just a pretty picture that sits up at your chosen domain. You need to understand website business goals, search engine optimisation, onsite conversion factors and a whole slew of other things in order to product a website that actually serves the goals of your business.

If even one of the above considerations had you scratching your head, put the Websites 101 book back on the shelf and get in touch with a professional firm. At the end of the day designing and building effective websites is a skill like any other and a professional job is always going to be better than you can manage yourself. After all, there are plenty of books and online guides on how to do surgery, but that doesn't mean you're going to crack out a scalpel on your poor granny's hip the next time she complains getting out of the car!