Should You Do Things Yourself or Go Hire Someone If You’re A Newbie

I know there’s no hard and fast rule on this subject. And for beginners this is even more trickier to choose which way to go.

Presumably when you just started off, money and time are not a luxury. Therefore they must be spent wisely or you may not achieve your desired goal in time.

We have always been advised to go look for a freelancer to do things we are good at such as building a website, creating sales page graphics, copywriting, installing scripts and so on.

Yes, we should focus on being a marketer but if you’re a beginner, you can’t afford to pay for every single job that needs to be done. As you know as newbie, everything is payables and very little is receivables. Therefore here are some areas that I recommend you acquire some basic skills at least:

• While I agree it’s easier to go to Elance.com and hire someone to do a graphic sets or something which is a rather serious undertaking, I would still recommend you pick up basic image editing skills if you need to do simple editing on some images for your blog post for example. Going to Elance for such a small task would be counter productive. So teach yourself how to use image editing tools such as Photoshop, GIMP, Photofiltre, Aviary, Picasa etc. There are a lot of online tutorials you can learn from – just do a search.
• Teach yourself some web page editing skills. Web page creation is no longer a job for a programmer as in the past as it gets so much simplified nowadays. Even kids can do it with ease and from time to time, you sure have something on your web page that you want to change its look or function. The question is – should you hire someone for that or do it yourself? The first option should be doing it yourself if you have the know how. If you don’t, start teaching yourself a lesson or two on HTML, CSS etc from now on.
• Adding functions to a website no longer require programming or coding. If you use one of the popular CMS systems, introducing new features  simply means uploading a new plugin or module to the web server. Yes, it’s a skill you need to be comfortable with too. And this is getting easier by the day too for some CMS no longer require you to do the FTP by yourself anymore – it does it for you. In WordPress.org, you just tell which plugin you’re interested in and it gets uploaded to your site from the dashboard.
• No doubt installing scripts onto a web server can be a real challenge to a lot of people. But it just like everything else – it’s difficult when we do things for the first time and script installation is no different. Script install is basically a standard process no matter which script you are dealing with. Typically all you need to do is – upload the script to server, change file or folder permissions if necessary, create a database, assign user to database, run install, enter configuration data and that’s probably it. It may be perceived as too technical but if it is just the installation part, really it’s not. So give yourself a try or two and see if that is reachable.
• If you’ve been building websites using HTML and do layouts via tables, do yourself a favor by learning some CSS. I too was using table for web page layout but it was painful and sometimes impossible to get a layout I wanted. CSS is much more friendly and elegant. All you need is to get some introductory lessons to CSS. CssBasics may be a good place to start your CSS lesson.

I’ve always thought that CSS is tough but it took me just one and a half days worth of self-tutoring to come up with a decent CSS layout page for the first time. I simply fall in love with CSS since then.

In most cases, if you passed the first few hurdles the goings will be easy afterwards. So just brace yourself for some initial jolts and you’ll be fine. More likely than not, you’ll be glad you tried.