When starting a new business, one of the biggest things that you might need to do is set up a website. In this day of age, companies must have a web presence in order to be found and do business. But while having a website now is no longer a question of whether you should or shouldn’t have one, it has become one more closely aligned with the question: just how much should I spend on a website?
The answer to this question really depends on your business objectives and the interest you place in having a strong online presence. What we’re going to examine in this post is the practice of having a free website, a templated website and a custom website – just which one is more appropriate and the right fit for you?
The free website.
While we no longer have sites like Geocities anymore, what we do have are free hosting providers that will gladly let you use their servers to host your site. Some advantages of using these services is that you can easily set up a website in mere minutes all by yourself and have no costs to worry about. However, the downsides may far outweigh the advantages – for a free service, you’re going to have to get used to the fact that it’s ad-supported. Also, while you might expect to have at least hundreds of megabytes of space, you will ultimately wind up with something to the amount of 20 mb – which would probably only allow you to do some limited work.
Sure, you could easily pay for a subscription model with most free hosting providers, but you would still be given less features than if you bought it from a regular hosting provider. As it relates to websites, these free hosting providers will allow you to do limited things with your website – basically set up a non-dynamic website complete with HTML and/or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but probably will not give you a database so you won’t be able to build any complex site. Essentially, the free website is giving you the liberty of building your own site without paying for hosting (except through the banner ads) and with limited feature support. Network Solutions has a free web site offer that is a great way to get started and see where your business goes. If you are homepreneur, this a great solution to start out with as well.
The templated website.
This is probably the easiest way for you to put up a great looking website. You can start with hosted models like nsHosting where you can find pre-designed websites that you can either purchase exclusively or not-exclusively. It will definitely give people the impression that you have a well executed website and take more pride in displaying your wares. Most of these template websites will gladly give you search queries that you can search for designs based on your specific industry, whether it’s a cafe/restaurant, business, exterior design, sports-focused, real estate, etc. But while you can buy the templates for cheap, you will need to spend more money to make sure that a specific design you choose will not be used by anyone else. Having a template could mean also that you have a great looking website, but since someone else built it, you don’t know the intricacies of it so there’s a huge learning curve on how to make any changes to the template. And since it looks good, does it mean that it’s going to be a great fit for your brand/company? Aesthetically it looks great, but might not be entirely what you need for your business.
The custom website.
Probably the most common type of websites out there – simply building a website that will match your needs right from the very beginning. With a custom website, you can tailor it exactly the way you want it. If you want to have it in a blog style or perhaps match your branding or even have a custom application on your website to track surveys or a specialized feature, then doing a custom website is the way to go. Sure, it will wind up taking you longer to implement a custom site, but the reward is that customers will find your website very professional looking and know that you have a great way of displaying the information they’re trying to find online.
Having a customized website is preferred because of the scalability that you can have versus the other two. If you wanted to have an e-commerce website tied into a blog with a survey tool, then this is probably the way to go. You have more control with what your business is more aligned with than compared to a template or a free website. On the other hand, while more control is guaranteed with custom sites, the one thing that you shouldn’t forget is that you will pay a cost proportional to the scope of your website. More complicated and advanced means a more expensive cost paid to your contractor and/or team.
Whatever your option, the main focus is getting a website set up for your business so that people will be able to find information about your business. In the past few years, a website has essentially become as important as business cards in the way things are done – if you don’t have a website, how else are people going to find you? Make sure that the one you choose meets the needs of the company, both from a sales and discover side to the financial one.
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