Your website is your most important marketing tool, but it can also be the most expensive. You need to make sure that you’re investing a good amount of money in creating a professional website that is easy to use. But if you’re working with a tight budget, that can be incredibly hard. When you don’t have a very big website budget, it’s easy to end up with a bad site that doesn’t do much for your business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you know how to plan and develop your website properly, you can still create an amazing website without spending too much money. These are some of the easiest ways to cut the cost of website development without having to make sacrifices on quality.
Understand Your Goals Before You Start
Why are you building this website in the first place? This seems like a simple question but it isn’t. If your answer is, to get more customers, that’s too broad. Everybody is creating a website to get more customers but you need to be a lot more specific. For example, you might be struggling to reach a certain demographic and you hope that your website will help you to break into that market. Maybe you think that your branding is attracting the wrong kind of customer and you want to reinvent yourself. Whatever your goals are, you need to be absolutely clear on them before you start designing the website. If you don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve and you don’t have a clear aim in mind, your website isn’t going to turn out the way that you want it to. That’s when you’ll have to start redesigning elements of the site and the process will become a lot longer and, most importantly, a lot more expensive.
In short, you need to make sure that you get your website right the first time and it meets your goals so you don’t have to keep going back to the drawing board and starting again at your own expense.
Choose One Development Company
A lot of different skills go into creating a great website. You need somebody to come up with designs and actually build the thing, then you need somebody to manage SEO, and somebody else to handle maintenance. You may also need some market research to make sure that you’re drawing the right kind of traffic to your website. If you’re paying a lot of different companies to fulfill all of those different roles, the cost is quickly going to spiral out of control. But if you hire one company like Praxent who can handle all of those different aspects themselves, the price is going to be a lot more manageable. It’s also going to help make your website more successful because all of those aspects will work in unison with one another but, if you’ve got different companies handling different areas, there can be a bit of a disconnect there.
Keep It Simple
Simplicity is important in web design because it improves the user experience, but it’s also important when you’re trying to stick to a budget. If you pack your website full of loads of animations it’s going to be annoying to use and, most importantly, it’s going to cost more money to build. Overloading your site with that kind of thing is going to make it run slowly as well which is the one thing that users hate most about a website. If you can strip back all of those flourishes and unnecessary frills and just stick to the things that are actually important, you’ll save a lot of money and your website will be a lot better for it.
Choose The Right Hosting Service
Picking a hosting service is important when you’re building a website but a lot of businesses get it wrong. If you’re trying to save money, you might think that you should just go for the cheapest option. That will save you money, but your website will suffer. It’s more likely to crash when you’ve got high levels of traffic and it’s more prone to problems. However, you also don’t want to be spending loads of money every year on your hosting. The key is to find a good middle ground between price and a hosting service that is going to fulfill your needs properly.
Manage It Yourself
Keeping on top of website maintenance is important but it can be expensive if you’re paying an outside service to do it. But you can save yourself a lot of money if you manage the website yourself. If you are considering this, it’s important that you’re realistic about your abilities and you should only manage your own site if you can do it properly, otherwise, your website isn’t going to work properly.
Saving money on your website doesn’t have to mean making sacrifices on quality if you just follow these simple steps.