How to build a website when on a limited budget
Many self-employed people, businessmen, and influencers don’t start seriously thinking about building and maintaining a website because they are terrified of the costs involved. However, this isn’t 2005 anymore, you can very easily get a professional-looking website up and running with a very small budget. If you consider the added business, name-recognition, and status a professional website will give you, you’ll find that it almost always pays for itself in the long run.
Do your research
The first thing you need to do is research. The tech world is always changing, and there are constantly new offers, new tools, new promotions that come out that you can use to your advantage. There is one particular area that is especially vital for you to pay attention to:
Web hosting
Web hosting will probably be your biggest running-cost. If you’ll get a lot of traffic and require large server storage, you can sink upwards of thousands of dollars a year on hosting. Nowadays, you can use both scalable and affordable cloud hosting or go the traditional hosting route with sites like GoDaddy. Research the big players in the sector, and see if any of them offer special discounts or promotions. Most likely, you’ll be able to find a host that will have some promotion which would make the first year of hosting virtually free.
Use freely available tools
Thanks to the growing and vibrant open source community, nowadays, you rarely have to pay for tools and software to help you with basic web design, photo-editing, video-making, content-writing, etc. tasks. For every paid service or software, there are two dozen equally impressive open-source alternatives that can help you achieve the same thing. In particular, software programs like GIMP (a photo editor) and Blender (a 3D model editor and creator), you won’t have any issues designing a professional and appealing website without using expensive software like Photoshop. You’ll potentially save hundreds of dollars going this route.
Delegate
You might be surprised to see delegation on an article talking about how you can build a website cheaply, but it makes perfect sense. It is very rare for a single person to have all the necessary skills that are required to create a bug-free, stylish, and content-rich website. That’s why if you’re creating a website on your own, it makes sense to delegate some tasks and ask for outside help. Trying to do everything on your own will result in a subpar product, and you might even spend more money in the long run. You can delegate tasks in various ways to minimise cost, as well:
- Using agencies: there are various professional agencies online that provide inexpensive, highly-specialised services that you might benefit from. For example, if you’re particularly talented when it comes to digital designing, but you struggle when it comes to turning the design into functioning code. You can use a PSD to WordPress service. Hiring an agency is usually a good idea if you have a medium to a large task and require consistent quality and professionalism.
- Outsourcing to freelancers: thanks to the Internet, you, now, can hire talented writers from all over the world. This is why you can probably find people who’ll be able to carry out highly-specialised tasks for you for a negligible sum of money. If you’re looking for expertly written content or custom-created art, commissioning freelancers is the way to go.