Whether you have a brick-and-mortar location, are a traveling service, or exist entirely online, your business needs a website. Building a website from scratch yourself can be an intimidating prospect, but you may find that it costs much less to build a great website than you expect.
Pick an Affordable Hosting Platform
When websites were first becoming essential for most businesses, it was necessary to use a web developer to build your site. Unfortunately, good developers that created beautiful sites cost a lot, making it challenging to build sites affordably.
Today, with the plethora of hosting platforms available, you can easily build a gorgeous website yourself at a wonderfully low rate. You can also make alterations to your site as needed. Some good options for affordable hosting platforms that enable you to create a beautiful site without knowing a programming language include:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Weebly
There are many more options for affordable and attractive web hosting. Don’t just go with the hosting platform you see the most ads for or someone you know is using. Do your research and choose the best possible hosting for your needs.
Build Content Yourself
Hiring a content writer and graphic designer can quickly get expensive, especially when you consider that you need quite a lot of content to be competitive. Creating your own content is a superb way to keep your costs down.
As an added advantage, making your content can make your site more unique and your business seem more legitimate. You may be stunned by just how easily you can create beautiful images just using your smartphone, a tool like Canva or Photoshop Light, and a bit of creativity. As for the website itself, you can quickly install a single-page WordPress theme and by the end of the afternoon, you’d have a brand new website running.
Keep in mind that even images that capture what is there can be extremely compelling. Don’t feel like you need to make highly abstract and heavily manipulated images to have the effect you’re looking for.
When it comes to content writing, you may worry that a few grammatical errors or typos will set you back. In fact, legitimate, heartfelt writing directly from the source is likely to appeal to your potential audience, and they will be happy to overlook a few mistakes. Don’t feel like you need to hire a professional content writer to create content for your sight.
Keep Data on a Cloud
You’ll be producing a lot of content for your website. Keeping it all on your computer can quickly get expensive. Furthermore, keeping content in a single place puts it at risk of being destroyed or compromised and prevents other people on your team from accessing it.
If you want anyone else on your team to help you build or maintain your website, giving them access to the original content is a good idea. Keeping data on a cloud is becoming increasingly popular for good reason.
Whether you want to use Google, Microsoft, or something else, you’ll find that keeping your files on a cloud gives more access to your team, keeps data safer, and keeps costs lower than storing content locally.
Keep it Simple
It can be so easy to do too much when building a website, especially when you consider all of the available possibilities. However, you’ll be very glad that you kept it simple as time goes on.
The more complex your site, the more challenging it can be to maintain and keep organized. More complex websites create a greater risk that your visitors will be confused and more likely to bounce off of your site.
Choose a simple grouping of categories, tags, etc., and stick to them as you create your blog posts and website pages. Remember that you don’t need very many anchor pages for the average site. Instead, put the essential information on straightforward pages where it will be easy to find and leave less important information for blog posts that you can easily link to from your major pages.
Keeping a clear, well-organized system of pages and blog posts will also benefit you if you decide to change your theme or make significant updates down the road since you won’t have to accommodate a lot of complicated design choices. Furthermore, simple, well-organized websites may be easier for Google to crawl and rank, and they will tend to load faster as well.
Enjoy a Gorgeous Website Without Spending Too Much
A website is imperative, regardless of what kind of business you operate. Whether you want your entire business to exist online or you are creating a website for a brick-and-mortar, having a great website can make the difference between success and failure. By utilizing these steps, you’ll find that you can make a great site without a huge investment.
