Creating a great business website is a complex process that not only requires a lot of time and effort, but money, too. A quick search can help you find numerous companies that offer to have your website up and running in a matter of minutes. For the most part, they do the job. You can have a fully-functioning website running in a relatively short time – but it won’t be the website you need.
A Business Website is More Than Just Pages
A business website isn’t just a collection of pages. Every single popular website you see has had a lot of time and effort put in to:
- Create content, so its visitors remain engaged
- Make it SEO-optimized, so you can find it easily
- Customize it, so you can have a great user experience
- Design it, so the colors and designs are appealing
- Tweak it, so visitors find the business solutions they’re looking for
Without all this work, a business website would never be found by search engines. Even if it were, it wouldn’t deliver the expected experience. In other words, it would just be another collection of web pages.
How Do You Create a Great, Cheap Website?
Sadly, it does cost money to create a really great website. Finding the cheapest way to achieve it all becomes the challenge. Everything from web hosting packages to SEO and social media campaigns will need to be done on a budget – and if you’re a small business, possibly a very low budget. To help you figure out how to get the most bang for you buck, follow these tips and start creating the site of your dreams.
1. Buy Cheap
The price of domain names and web hosting services has fallen drastically in recent years, but you do still need to invest in these services, since using a free domain or web hosting package could do more damage than good.
- Free domain names can your business look unprofessional, raising suspicions about your commitment to quality service.
- Your free web hosting providers can close shop or just kick you off of their servers for no apparent reason – it usually says so in the fine print.
- You usually have the hosting providers’ ads (or those of their sponsors) intruding on your website.
It just isn’t pleasant. You will be better off buying cheap (but not free) domain names and hosting solutions from great companies.
2. Do a Pre-Assessment
Before you go out hunting for free stuff, do an inventory of the quality and features you’re looking for for your business website. Strip it down to its bare minimums until you have the basic structure you need. No frills, no bells and no whistles – that’s what you are aiming for. If done correctly, you will be surprised at how much you can do with very little.
3. Get Some Tech Know-How
Trying to build a business website without any tech skills is admirable, but not really a wise decision. You should, at the very least, be able to make basic HTML code tweaks. Also, investing a little time and effort in improving your tech skills can help you cut down on time wasted trying to figure out what is going on or what a particular piece of your website code does. With so many free online courses to choose from, you don’t have any excuse not to learn some basic skills!
4. Use Free Website Designers
Websites like Wix allow you to create amazing websites for free. They have an unbelievable array of templates you can choose from and features that allow you to simply drag and drop widgets onto your website. Beware, though: you will need to invest a serious amount of time into this venture, especially if you have no prior experience.
5. Take Advantage of Free Features
You can add additional external features like a WordPress blog to make a better, stronger website. If you think you need a content management system (CMS) that will serve your content and news articles, you can try the likes of Joomla. Mix and combine different features until you create the right website.
6. Try Free eCommerce Solutions
If you have an ecommerce site, then you can use sites like Jimdo to quickly launch a full-fledged online store.
7. Learn How to Market Online
Any business website will need to be marketed online. Learn everything you can about social media marketing (SMM) and search engine optimization (SEO). The beauty of the internet is that you can promote your website online using free social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. All you need to do is to know how.
Finally…
Let us part with the knowledge that you can indeed create a great business website for not a lot of cash. While every feature we have seen is free, your knowledge and the time and effort you put into this project is still valuable and can make all the difference in the success of your business.
