Let’s be honest, judging how much a website costs just by looking at the design isn’t the easiest thing to do. There’s a lot of factors that you have to consider. It’s not just about how the website looks, but also how it functions. The aesthetic is just another part of the bigger picture.
As a digital marketing company, we’ve created websites for a variety of different clients with different needs depending on their business. Having all that experience gives us opinions on aspects you should consider when investing on a website.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when spending for a website:
- Is it worth your money?
- What does your website need?
- Is it important for your website?
Hiring a designer or web developer can really help you when it comes to the technical and aesthetic elements of your website. Even then, their help goes beyond by making sure your website functions well and can cater to your target market.
These professionals can help you with:
- Choosing and creating a website that’s within your budget, technical level, and the time you’re willing to give.
- Steering clear of technical and financial complications.
The main goal of this entire article is for us to give you a sort of free consultation for the different prices on your website.
The pricing of websites differ depending on which route you’re willing to go, hiring a designer or developer can cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars, while a simple and basic drag and drop website builder might only cost you five to ten dollars. You can even DIY your own website with these website builders. No need to code or spend a lot.
Here are some of the best website builders online:
These website builders all have a free of adverts, personal domain, and unlimited bandwidth feature. This mean you have the option to not have ads appear in your website, get a personal website address, and you can decide on the amount of traffic your website can handle.
Asking The Right Question!
As stated above, there are many factors to consider when paying for a website. There is no given cost to a website. It all depends on what type of website you need, your budget, and even how the website functions. The concept of cost is a subjective matter that depends entirely on the person and his/her needs.
There are 4 factors to consider when building a website
- Your time
- Your technical knowledge
- Your design skills
- Budget
Think which of these resources you have and which you don’t. It will be easier for you to work on your website after determining what you have and need. It’s not a requirement to have all of these when starting your website. You can always learn one or acquire the skill along the way via tutorials online. With that, you have to ask yourself which of the 4 resources you lack.
What resources do you lack?
Out of the 4 resources mentioned above lacking one will help you modify the needs of your website.
Let’s be real, out of the 4 resources money is the most flexible and easiest to adjust. Time is needed to build a website, you have to know or learn coding, and you have to know are learn design.
Unlike the other 3, money is easier to budget depending on your website’s needs. It’s all the matter of knowing how and where to spend your money. You have to know if it’s worth your money.
Putting money aside, let’s estimate the cost of your website depending on your lack of:
- Your technical knowledge
- Your design skills
- Your time
The three resources mentioned above will be factors that will affect the cost of your website.
Limited Resources
Building, managing, and operating your website requires you to deal with 5 phases:
- Setting up your website
- Learning how to use a website builder
- Designing your website
- Creating your content
- Troubleshooting and maintenance
From here, you have to determine if you have the complete resources for each phase to do them successfully. If you’re missing one of the resources you have the option to hire a professional or use the website builders available.
The website builder can take over the technical and design aspects of creating a website. It might cost you less and use lesser of your time. Some examples of website builders are Wix and squarespace.
These website builders are also called drag and drop websites since there won’t be any skills required in setting the website up. These are fully automated websites make designing really easy for you with it’s drag and drop tools.
However, these websites limit you from with a few of their features. Their readily available designs may not be entirely customized for you. But even with these limitations, your likely to find what you need for your website.
Costs
OPTION 1: Hiring a professional
The common cost of hiring a professional can reach thousands of dollars. It all depends on the demands of your website. Some websites are easier to create than others, while some have more interactive websites and have more complicated designs. You have to pay for your host site and even the maintenance of your website. Hiring professionals will be a pricey. Unless you choose to learn how to do it all by yourself, you are likely to spend a bit of money. Hiring professionals will also lessen the cost of your time, you’ll have to spend some money but you’ll have more time to focus on other business ventures.
Option 2: Using a drag and drop website builder
A drag and drop website builder will generally be cheaper. Some of these website builders have free plans, but you won’t have your own domain name. If you do choose to pay for their plan you’ll have more access to different designs. Unless you want to completely redesign your website and don’t want to do it yourself, hiring a designer will cost you some money. Using this method will give you the freedom to DIY your website without having to trouble yourself with coding or maintenance. The website builder does it all for you. It won’t cost that much money but it will cost you your time.
Conclusion..
The cost of your website highly depends on your resources available. If you lack time, technical knowledge, design skills, and money, your costs will build up. The costs can be anything from time or trying to learn and acquire skills and knowledge in the technicalities and design of building a website.
In short, you have to manage how much time you’re willing to commit to the website, how much you’re willing to invest for professionals, and the likelihood of missing out on more opportunities because of your used time.
To summarize, you can hire a professional if you want to get the job done without troubling yourself. It’s all a matter of investing your money in professionals. You could also use a website builder if you have limited resources, time, and money.
Asking the right questions will help you determine the cost of your website, once you understand what resources you have then you’ll know which path to gear towards. It will then be easier to determine if you need to hire a professional or use a drag and drop website builder.