Affordable Website Design

A business website, being one of the most important marketing assets of any business, it’s important to you do your research.  Here are the 3 things a business should know for an affordable website design.

As one of the most inexpensive forms of advertising, a powerful website should never be underestimated. Your website is a link, a connecting tool that extends your reach and enables you to more effectively connect with your market.  For that reason, you need to take considerable care as a business when developing or upgrading your website. Now, here are 3 few things you should take into account for an affordable website design.

Factors the determine the cost of  a Website

Web design and development does not have a one size fits all cost or criteria. Typically, the cost of developing a website will rest with the experience and level of design and development that needs to go into a professional website.  As a business, you need to have a clear idea of your brand, your competition, your business and who your target audience to build a site that’s engaging and professional. The cost of a website is determined by a number of factors, some of which are:

• The general charges, which include the domain name, the hosting, security, web planning, designing and development, the continued website maintenance and the cost of advertising for your website online.
• Overall or starting from scratch?  Typically a new site will cost more.
• The addition of a blog and content management system.
• Features and functionalities built into the website. Will it be a lead generation or e-commerce site?
• Costs of mobile and responsive designs, if you want it to automatically resize for tablets and other mobile devices. Which is a must for websites today.
• Designs, images and graphics.
• Multimedia elements including videos and animation
• Costs for content creation and insertion.
• Integration of contact us forms and back end data capture
• Marketing automation with auto-replies and triggered emails
• Ensuring it’s search engine friendly
• Website hosting, choosing the right hosting company is critical to keeping your website live.  Here are the top recommended companies.

The Approach to Designing an Affordable  Website

To get the best result, you should not just dive into design. You need to have an approach and a plan that will ensure you get a great design that supports your short and longer-term business goals. A good agency will work with you to define the following:

• Know your different audiences and the industry the business represents as well as the goals the website should help to meet.
• Planning, which involves the budget, the schedule, the team and also the sitemap
• Designing, which focuses on the look, the feel and the style of layout that will be used.
• Development, which will include coming up with the program, optimizing and testing.
• The launching of the website in search engines, monitoring its success and reporting
• Maintaining the website, enhancing it, updating it and promoting it as per your business growth
• Choosing a website builder will impact your development costs
• WordPress, a very popular website builder, has many website themes to choose from and can lower your design and development costs
• For very small websites you can choose a website builder like Wix.com.

In selecting the right website builder, the tradeoff is customization, usability, flexibility and ongoing management costs.

Design Elements to Consider in Making a Great Website

When designing the website, the premise that should be kept in mind is that the website is meant to be great – not just good but great! Users should have a great time when they are on your website. This is possible if you pay close attention to the following: 

• The loading speed
• The length of your website pages
• Page navigation
• Image size
• Use of colours
• Content and type of content
• Use of links

Having the 3 things a business should know about designing an affordable website,  you can create an effective marketing tool that helps meet your immediate and more long-term growth goals.

Need to design a new website.  Contact us and share your ideas.