How Much Should You Spend Building a Website?

If you’re a small business owner, you may be worried about the price you will pay to get your business up and running. While it can cost a large amount of money to get your website up, that isn’t always the case. There are ways to get a great looking site without breaking the bank and in this article we will go over different options that will allow you to get a website that fits your budget.

What Makes a Website Cost More Than Another Website?

If you were to look at one website vs another, you might not know the cost to build a website. Truthfully, it is very difficult to know the value of a website by looking at its design. A website that looks fancy doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. There are so very nice free template and themes online that are free or very low cost.

It isn’t only the look of the best that determines the cost. It is true that if you have a lot of custom made graphics on your site that will raise the cost because you had to pay the designer, but there are many things that go into a website that are not visual, they are functional. The functions of your website are usually more costly than the look of your website. If you can get an itemized invoice of a fancy website that you frequent, you would be able to see exactly what I mean.

What Are Your Goals for Your Site?

Before you start planning out your website, you need to figure out the goals that you have for your site. Maybe you want to collect leads and build your list or is it building brand awareness? Creating a community? Some people use their websites to raise funds for charity and many people use their sites to make sales.

There is no right or wrong answer when you are creating your goal for your website. While there are expert opinion about how to best use your site to help your business, you are the only one that knows what your personal and business goals are.

It always helps to get your goals down on paper or put them online with mind map so that you can see how everything is connected and how your website is going to help you. A lot of times when you understand this it is easier to allocate funds to the website project because you understand the importance of its function in your business plan.

What You Are Paying For

If you use a website designer to put your website together you could be paying over $5,000. If you are a new or small business, this can be a lot of money to put out when you are trying to make sure the lights stay on and you have business supplies that you need to do your work.

A web designer will charge you for setup, design, maintenance, and training you to use the site. This can add up quickly or you can use other options like WordPress which starts out free with only the cost of hosting and a domain that you need for your site to function. Web design is not inexpensive but you will either have to pay for it or learn how to do it on your own. Every business needs a website that functions well and allows visits to find what they are looking  for.

How Much Will Your Website Cost If You Build It?

There are a lot of options to choose from if you decide that you want to build your website yourself, but the option we always recommend is WordPress. Not the WordPress.com version, but the WordPress.org version that is self-hosted.

When you use the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can use this CMS for free. The only thing that you have to pay for is the domain name to point to your website and the hosting to house your website files. Depending on how long you buy your domain name and hosting for and how big your hosting page depends on how much money that is going to cost you.

The real cost that comes into play is your time. The good news is that when you are working with WordPress, there are tools that will help you reduce the amount of time that you spend working on your website. A lot of these tools come in the form of plugins. You can do almost anything you can think of when you use plugins from design to SEO.

If you are worried about who you would design your site and make it look good if you were taking care of your own website using WordPress, there are page builder plugins like Beaver Builders that will allow you to build impressive websites with drag and drop technology. You don’t need to know any coding and you can choose different ways to edit your site and even the website live.

Conclusion

No matter how you decide to build your website, it is important that you have one. A website is as common as a business card these days and even more important. Taking the time or the money to get your website built will result in long last value when it is done properly and used as a part of your marketing strategy.

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