Experts in design and development of digital products. Mobile and Web Applications.

Developing a website for our website is possibly one of the most important projects we can venture into, given that it's our cover letter or our 24/7 365 storefront. Be it an established business or a startup, the priority when tackling this task is to take a moment to analyze the costs that launching a website entails.

The problem we'll usually encounter is that there's more to a website than you'd usually believe or expect. Therefore, some quotes can differ greatly from the final price, and we can even find some tools and opportunities to develop our website completely free of cost.

In the following article we'll briefly discuss every detail necessary to begin our project.

To this effect, we'll analyze the following costs involved:

• Domain name
• Hosting
• Design
• Content
• Development
• Marketing

Domain name

A domain name is the unique and exclusive alias an website gets in order to be easily available.

For many choosing a domain name is as simple as typing their business' name in a search engine and adding the .com extension. Nonetheless, there's plenty of reasons why companies allocate considerable funding to acquiring multiple versions of their domain name - the biggest of which is to stop people with ill intentions from registering one that's similar for criminal purposes. 

On the other hand, a lot of .com domains are already occupied, so alternatives have been used for quite some time.

The costs of a domain name can also depend on your company's sector - For example, a .tech domain can be more expensive than a .store domain. On the other hand, if we buy a domain name for several years we'll usually get a discount, which can make it more profitable in the long run.

Hosting

We'll also need a place to host the site. Choosing a web hosting plan is a fundamental decision, and ideally you do not want to save money in this part, as it will be a factor in your website's performance. A cheaper hosting option will mean a slower website, and a possibly sub-optimal user experience.

There's a series of factors to consider that can infuence the total cost, such as:

• Whether or not we need managed hosting.
• Our website's potential traffic. 
• The monthly bandwidth we need.

Last, but not least, it's also a good idea to include an SSL certificate in our budget, as it has become borderline essential.

Content

For content creation costs, the three main elements to consider are written content, graphics, and video or audio.

In general, if the project's just starting out it's best to keep content creation to ourselves, which will save money. Nonetheless, it's a hugely important task, so whenever possible it's a good idea to hire professionals for it. 

Design

Every point we have mentioned so far is important and can be the difference between success an failure, but visual is clearly key. This is why we consider important to hire a professional for this task. Having cleared this up, there's two ways to approach design: pre-made templates or custom designs.

What are pre-made templates?

Today we can find a lot of pre-made templates or free designs on website builders like Wix or Weebly that can be used to easily create a good looking website. We'll probably run into some issues to customize these designs but they become a good option when dealing with a smaller budget.

What are custom designs?

In our opinion, the best option whenever possible. It will allow us to create a site that is completely original and unique for our brand, and guarantee it won't look like the competition's. If we're taking this option we probably have a bigger budget.

Development

In the past, making changes to our website meant assuming costs that were often unplanned. Today, we have different Content Management Systems that let us quickly and easily update and make changes to our website, with no extra payments or depending on a dev team. For us, it's really important to include a content manager when developing a website which, among other things, will help avoid futther costs when making changes. 

Among a wide range of CMS we can find different characteristics and costs. There's the world-famous "free" CMS, like Wordpress, Joomla, Devesh Sharma, WP Kube, etc. And there's also the closed source, which have a cost but have plenty of advantages we can make use of.

We invite you to find out more about our very own CMS, Columnis, which we've been developing since 2007 and currently serves more than 400 local and international customers.

www.columnis.com

Marketing

The right investment in marketing will make sure our website is visible to the audience we're aiming at. This will give us a constant visitor flow and improve our general position in search engines like Google.
A website isn't enough if no one sees it.

In general, we need to focus on two big aspects: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Management).

SEO

Optimizing our website for search engines is a must if we're looking to attract as many visitors as possible. There's many different SEO services currently available, ranging from low-cost options to big monthly investments. 

SMM (Social Media Management) 

Social media is an important element to consider for success in any online business. The use of platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook can deliver amazing results for our business, but it all depends on how we use them.

If the budget has room for it, it's ideal to hire professionals (like agencies or independent contractors) who provide wide-ranging services from setting up the accounts, to planning and creating social media content.

In conclusion

Even if a website's costs shouldn't be a deciding factor when choosing how to approach developing it, the resources at our disposal do have a big role to play in our online business' success. Therefore, we can sum up the following four key areas to consider when drafting our budget:

• Domain name choice
• Web hosting plan
• Hiring a designer or agency, or doing it ourselves. 
• Choosing what actions to take to improve our website's visibility.

If you're interested in developing a website, or refresh your current one, we'd love to help you: Contact us.