The pandemic has taught us a lot of things on business resilience. Lots of people were still not sold on the idea of having to put their business online until it was going online that only kept businesses going.
Having your own website is not the only way to put your business online. There’s also social media and the platform is free to join. But I will discuss this in another post, for another time. For now, I will try to shed light on how much it really costs to own a website for those who are not sure why they should spend for their own online space outside of social media. I will discuss between trying to build your own website and the things you need, and hiring someone to help you build it out.
basic things to have when building your own website
If There are a few things that you need that are important when you are having a website built and they are:
- Domain
- Hosting
- Business Direction
- Time to build the website
Domain
You want to register your own domain based on your business name or if you are building your professional brand, then you might want to check if your name is available in domain registrars like Namecheap or GoDaddy.
When you register a domain name, the cost depends on how unique it is or how generic it is. If it’s something generic and looks like most people would want to register, then the price is normally more expensive. A unique name would normally cost around $10-20 and renews every year.
Hosting
A hosting account is something you need where you can upload your website files and connect your domain. So when your customers type in your website yourbusiness.com, it becomes accessible to that person. Basically, you can have a domain but a hosting account is where you will build your website on. Without the two, you will not have a working website.
Hosting accounts usually cost around $80 to $100 per year.
Business Direction
Why do you need business direction in building your website? It’s important to sit down and write down what you want to show on your website. If you are a business, you want to decide how you are going to market your business like showing your products and services, what differentiates you from other similar businesses, etc. If you are a professional brand, you want to decide how you want to position yourself and how you are going to show that on your website.
Time to build the website
How fast you can build your website depends on how much time you can allot in building it and where you are building it. There are companies who offer fast website building – you can choose a theme and start populating the design with your business information for about $100-200 per year, like Wix.
When you account for the time you spend in planning the business direction for your website, and the time to build your website, only you can put a price on the time that you spend here. Most often than not, your time is better spent on running your business than putting in lots of time on something you won’t be able to focus on a hundred percent.
hiring a website company to build your website
When you hire a website company to build your website for you, it will save you lots of time trying to build a website that meets your standards. They can build a website that is unique and not based off of a theme that lots of businesses may already be using, and can provide all of the basic things you need without the stress.
If you want an experienced website company that can help you build your website, so you can focus all your time on concentrating on your business, then you can contact us and we can start discussing your website project.
Our basic website builds usually start at $600 for custom builds and $500 for theme-based builds for businesses on a budget. And then a recurring minimal fee that renews every year for domain and hosting services.
Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels