Deciding between hiring a developer or building the website myself

I'm looking to start an online business. I have an idea and I have it on paper. I am not sure if I should use a web developer or if I should use one of the builders I keep coming across online. I have never made a website before but I know what I want it to look like.

The web page is going to be a service with two diffent subscriptions. First subscription is free the other is going to be paid. I am new to this so I don't want too many details about my idea out there for someone else to use. Example free subscription is "The buyer" paid subscription "the seller" I hope that helps.

What criteria should I consider when deciding whether to hire a web developer and do it myself using a website builder?

It depends on several parameters like: you starting capital, the time you have for this project, if you already have potential users or not yet, etc.

Be sure that this kind of website is a "every day job" for the majority of professional webbuilders. So no problem on that side.

You may build it by yourself with some CMS (Content Management System) like Drupal (drupal.org) but if you never created any website, I would advice you to give it to some professional - othervise you will spend lot of time by learning te CMS itself, the necessary abour webhosting, templates, payments methods and so one...

Just be sure that your requirements are precise enough to make the webbuilder job faster and easier. You should also think about the name and check if the domain is stil available.

Payment option? The webbuilder will tell you what is available for credit cards/bank transfer payments. And consider also the PayPal implementation.

For your last question: of course they are such a services. Just google it. But for the moment, concentrate yourself on the creation of the website. Don't spend your time yet on "who will I hire when my site grows enough...". For the moment, do the first step and create the website + create your company & Co. It's already more than enough to think about for the moment...

Good luck!

as A professional web designer, I am a bit biased, however my thoughts are as follows:

If your site uses just HTML, you can probably do it yourself.
If your site uses PHP, ASP, or another higher difficulty language, get a pro.
If you plan to handle any form of payments/monetary transactions, get a pro.
If the livelihood of your business depends on the site being successful, get a pro, and get another pro to do the SEO (should not be the same person, unless they are amazing).

If your site needs user logins, shopping carts, etc, you probably should get a pro.

(Obviously, you can find out-of-the-box software solutions that you can use, which substitute buying the software for a pro, however without a professional designer, you will still be quite limited)

First: http://jeffjason.com/2012/09/the-value-of-an-idea/ and http://www.venturestab.com/2011/02/why-startups-shouldn%E2%80%99t-ask-investors-to-sign-ndas/ in short, there are no truly novel ideas and you are not going to give away a fortune by writing "too many details". As fake Mark Zuckerberg said in that fake movie "If you had made facebook, you would have made facebook." (or something to that affect)

Second: there is no canonical answer to your question. The answer is highly dependent on your circumstances. You should try things out and determine if you can do it yourself or not. If you can't (and by that I mean are not willing to invest the time to learn how to) do it yourself, it may be very expensive to try and automate your amazing wizbang idea. Find a cheap manual way of validating your idea and go from there.

You took a good first step by coming here and asking some questions. But, I'm not sure you are asking the right questions.

If you have no idea what you are doing then you are going to need a "developer". There are good developers and then there are bad developers. A good developer will take time to understand your project and business goals. They will do more than develop a site, but also includes understanding and supporting critical details.

One example, if your site is going to be huge or if you are going to spend 50k a month marketing it, then your site is going to have to built to scale. This gets complicated in the ways you store data, keep user sessions, etc.

Another example would be if you are using Adwords to advertise your business. Any web designer can give you a site that you can market, but if the developer understands your whole business he can also support your marketing efforts. Right now Adwords doesnt really prevent click fraud (properly). For our sites we log every visitor IP to an internal database and if they come from adwords twice we update our Adwords IP restrictions manually. A developer that understands your objectives, can plan for such issues and provide you with a solution to problems you forsee now and those that may arise.

Lastly, get someone local. If this is your first project you dont really want to offshore a project. I use a offshore developers, but i have the ability to read code, and understand when I am getting quality work. The savings only pay off if you can technically manage the developers.

Try to find a local nerd who is passionate.

I am in your shoes and building a web site with database and advanced functionality for my startup. At the moment I am doing it myself. The reasons are:

1. I have long term hobby programmer experience (but not for web).
2. I love programming.
3. I love learning new things.
4. I have job and am not under time pressure, so I can enjoy learning.
5. There is amazing amount of free resources online if you are ready to learn. Including this site :)
6. Until now, I was able to find solution to every problem I needed to solve.
7. Developers I met so far were either too busy, uninterested, or did not impress.

Let me also mention the technology stack I need for my project (a travel search site):

Front end: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Backbone-Marionette or Angular
Back end: I plan to use Backend as a Service: Parse.com or StackMob.
They take over the burden of user signup and database management.
I also need PHP scripts for maintenance tasks on my database.

You may want to try to search for tutorials on those and see what you are getting into :) Then by all means try to do yourself as much as you can. That way you will not only be forced to think in much more concrete terms, but also better understand the value of each piece of work. The harder you find it to do yourself, the better you will feel to pay someone for doing that.

Now you mention website builder ... these are tools usually meant for simple personal sites with a couple of pages, they usually generate a horde of unreadable code that can be very backward technologically and full of security holes. What if some bad guy steals your customer data and publishes them or your site crashed and data is lost? Not a big deal for your average personal site but a big issue for serious business.

So try as much as you can, then see what help you can get and how much it will cost.

Good luck!