Setting up a website for the first time is an extremely thrilling step to take. It is a sign that you are focused on your business and determined to make it a success. After all, the Internet is a very global community, not so, and YOUR website will be exposed to this community from the day that it goes live. You therefore set up your website with the idea that you will attract customers to your new business.
But before your website can become a well-oiled marketing machine you will need to invest time, or money, or both, into it.
The following aspects are all costs that go into setting up and running of a business website:
1. Direct cost of creating the website. Whether you do it yourself, or whether you pay for it, you have to remember that your time is also worth money.
2. Direct cost of marketing your website. Your website will NOT just start generating traffic all on its own. You are going to have to first spend money on promoting your website before you are going to see any return on investment. Setting up a new website with no promotion behind it is like setting up a shop in a dark alley with no advertising. There will be no feet visiting that shop! You need to get your website out of its dark alley and into the light and that will cost money!
Even if you do the majority of this work yourself, you once again have to consider the fact that your time is worth money, and you should think carefully whether you want to invest your time in this activity, or rather spend it on other aspects of your business.
3. Indirect or direct costs of updating your website with fresh content. It is absolutely essential to update your website with new and regular content. At the minimum you will have to update new contact information, prices and special offers. But it is far better to update your site with additional information about your company and industry to capture more visitors who might be looking for the very information that you are providing. A site filled with lots of information about your industry also establishes you as the expert in the field and builds trust in your visitors and potential customers.
So how much SHOULD you spend on your website? If you are a start-up business, it is a very appealing thought to spend as little as possible on your site, since you probably do not have lots of cash to throw around.
That is understandable, but be careful of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. A badly designed website can be extremely detrimental to the image of your company, and if the technology choices that you might inadvertently tie yourself into due to opting for a low cost, or cheap option, are the wrong choices, you will probably find it quite expensive to extricate yourself from these design decisions.
What do we mean by this?
I have often seen websites that have clearly been done on the cheap. This can often be seen from the bad quality of the graphics, glaring and clashing colours, ugly page elements such as cheap animated gifs and poor navigation structures – all of this gives a bad impression of your company. The way that your website looks is extremely important with regards to the first impression that you make on your visitor. Do you want to project a professional image, or one that screams: “I did not have enough money so my neighbour’s kid did my website for me”.
Also, and even more importantly, inexperienced web designers often create web sites using frames or javascript for navigation. This makes the site inaccessible for search engines, thereby rendering the site completely useless from a search engine perspective. In real terms, this means that you are probably very unlikely to ever get lots of traffic to your website from the search engines and the whole reason why you wanted to have the website in the first place is now negated.
Websites can be very costly (quality takes time, and time equals money, it is as simple as that), so if you are just starting out with your first website and your company is cash strapped, by all means try and go for a lower cost option, but educate yourself first of all the options, and if you can, go for the best value website that your money can buy – it will save you in the long term.