Everybody knows how important it is for businesses to have a great website. You need to invest in a professional web designer, a great SEO package and good maintenance. The thing is, that all costs a lot of money. That’s fine if you’re an established business and you’ve got plenty of money to spend, but what if you’re a new business? You could just spend all of your money on an amazing website but then you won’t have any money left for marketing your products, hiring staff and anything else you need to run a business. So, what are you supposed to do? The good news is, a lot of people are wrong about web design and it doesn’t have to be as expensive as they think. You don’t have to compromise, you can still build a great website without spending loads of money on it. These are some of the best ways to cut the cost of web design and still create an amazing website.
Use A Website Builder
Paying a professional to build your website for you is always going to cost a lot of money. But the thing is, you don’t really need to do that because you can just do it on your own. There are so many great website builders out there and most of them are completely free. They come with loads of great templates that you can use so you don’t actually need to build the whole site from the ground up, you just need to customize the templates. You don’t need any knowledge of how to code a website so anybody can create their own website easily using one of these builders.
The main downside of website builders is that you are somewhat limited because you can only use the tools available to you, you can’t build any custom features. A lot of people give this as a reason not to use them, but it’s not really a problem most of the time. The majority of business websites have a fairly standard layout and it’s only if you’re trying to create something completely out there that the website builders won’t fit your needs. When you’re trying to cut costs and build a professional looking site, free website builders will work just fine.
Choose Hosting Services Wisely
Web hosting is a tricky issue because you need to find a balance between price and quality. Some of the less expensive services don’t do well when you’ve got high levels of traffic and they’ll be really slow. That is obviously a big issue and that’s why a lot of people say that you always need to pay for more expensive hosting. However, it’s still possible to find cheap hosting that can handle a decent amount of traffic. You also need to be realistic about the level of traffic that you expect to get. When you’re first starting out, it’s not likely that you’re going to get enough traffic to crash your website, so the cheaper services will do fine. In the future, when you’re more successful and you’re earning more money, you can start thinking about redesigning the website and paying for more expensive hosting services.
Use Fewer Pages
The more complicated your website is, the more money you’ll spend on building and maintaining it. A website with loads of different pages and categories is also a bit frustrating for people to use. When somebody enters a website, they want to find what they’re looking for right away. People are very impatient online and if they can’t immediately find the relevant pages, they’re probably just going to give up. So, using fewer pages on your site means that it’s more streamlined and simpler to use, and it’s going to save you a lot of money. Have a look over your plans for the website and see if there is anything that you can drop. For example, do people really need a long history of you and your company? It might be of interest but if you’re dedicating 3 pages to it, you can probably drop a lot of that. Anything that isn’t absolutely necessary should be dropped and you should try to stick to the relevant information so you’re using the minimum amount of space possible.
Reduce Animations
Website maintenance is an ongoing cost that you have to bear, but if you design your site with that in mind, you can reduce those costs by quite a bit. A website that is running a lot of complicated animations is more prone to issues, so you should try to keep them at a minimum. Animations can be beneficial when used correctly but so many companies end up creating a website that is more style than substance so it’s got loads of flashy looking animations but it’s not actually that great to use. You need to avoid falling into that trap and just focus on making it look professional, putting all of the necessary information on there, and making sure that it’s simple to use.
Free Images
Images are so important on your website. People don’t respond very well to massive blocks of text and it’ll make your website appear boring and dull if you don’t have any pictures of videos to catch people’s attention. You might be able to save yourself a bit of money if you take your own photos for the website but you’re still going to have to pay for camera equipment and, unless you have professional training, your photos aren’t going to be very good. Most companies will pay a professional photographer to take all of the images for their site but that’s going to be very expensive. If you want to save money, you should make use of stock images instead. There are some great sites with thousands of professional images that are absolutely free, so there’s no need to pay for them. You might need to pay for a few original images of your products but for the most part, you can get away with free images.
Building a good website for your business doesn’t have to be expensive if you just follow these basic rules.