So you want a website? And ways to reduce costs

Article: So you want a website? And ways to reduce costs

Recently, you decide you want a website for personal or business purposes, and you notice the prices and services vary widely among Web design and development companies. You see that so many different technologies and abundant tools are used to make websites. You also see that a website can be created by a 10 years old kid, or it requires
hundreds of employees to build and maintain. You find that
a site costs from zero to tens of millions of dollars to
build. For many people, this is a scene of confusion.
One of the reasons is the Internet is very young - it's
a newborn in its very long life. It seems in every week,
a new type of technological innovation is introduced to
enhance The World Wide Web.

This article explains only some ways you can reduce costs.
The cost of a website is too broad to cover in a short
article, plus the constant change in technology mentioned
above makes it harder to know the fixed costs. The bottom
line is no matter what kind of technology is used to create
a site, a site should be useful to you and users, and a site
must have visitors. It'll take more than an article to explain
how to get visitors and make sites useful. Your Web service
company probably offers Web promotion and marketing service,
or it'll find one for you. By the way, there are sites that cost
peanuts to make and maintain, though it attracts thousands
of visitors everyday. There're also sites that cost thousands
of dollars to make and not a single visitor comes - those are
pretty costly mistakes.

Ways to reduce costs

• Prepare your site in advance. Write down the purpose
  of your site and what each Web page must contain. Visit several
  websites you like to have an idea about your site should be. If
  you have new ideas, write them down. Prepare all images and
  text contents before talking to a Web design company. Good
  preparation reduces time during the meeting and helps your Web
  design contractor designing your site right and effectively.

• Create your own site free within a free hosting site.
  The drawbacks are:

  - Part of your website address contains Web hosting address.
  For example, if 'www.savingsforyou.net' is a free hosting
  site, and your Web page is 'yourpage', your page address
  would be 'www.yourpage.savingsforyou.net'. Furthermore,
  your host will put his/her ads on your Web page; therefore,
  it doesn't look professional if it's a business site.

  - Your may loose some visitors when you decide to move away
  and establish your own site.

  - You host may close down its free hosting site in the future.

  
  

• Use your existing logos and images or create them yourself.
  You save the costs of creating art works.

• Write your own text contents and provide them to Web
  design/development firm. Use one format for all your contents
  if you can. The reason is your Web service firm may charge
  extra costs for the time it writes contents for your site
  or reformat and edit your contents.
  
  
• Get estimates from several Web services companies. Their
  prices may vary widely, but you should look for the quality
  you'll buy. Also, recommendations from friends and relatives
  would be helpful.

• Shop around for a domain name. (If you can't, for additional
  fee, a Web service firm will do it.) Make up your own domain which
  does not belong to anyone; make sure it's not an existing trade
  mark, and register it with an ICANN accredited Registrar. A
  domain name is a website address that uniquely identifies your
  site on the Internet. For example, the domain name of this
  website is savingsforyou.net. A domain name is just a name,
  not a website, until all other Web elements are installed then
  it becomes a website. The cost of owning a domain name per year
  is about a regular lunch money or dinner money. Before
  registering, visit Web hosting forums to check the reputations
  of domain registrars to see which one is providing good service.
  Create a domain that is easy to remember and contains keyword(s)
  in it. Some search engines may give your site a little bonus if
  your site contains keyword(s) in a domain name. It would be good
  if a domain's paying for itself or more in the form of additional
  visitors coming to your site.

  
  

• Consider the cost of a website as an investment. If you and
  your staff put in hours and hours working on a website to make
  it useful to your targeted users, you'll be rewarded with more
  visitors and/or earning money.

  
  

• Avoid unnecessary graphical works and images to reduce costs.
  Surely, your site looks great with all those glamorous images,
  bells and whistles, and cutting-edge graphics. The problem is
  search engines don't understand how pretty those pictures and
  images are, or whatever is in them; search engines understand
  only text. Furthermore, most people come to a site looking for
  information - for useful text content. Hence, think about
  producing more valuable text content for users and search
  engines instead of paying for extra graphics. By the way, if
  your website is an artistic one, then you need the best of
  both worlds.

  
  

• Prepare a list of frequently asked questions with answers
  which the users often ask you or your staff on the phones, and
  make a FAQ Web page. It will save you valuable time and costs
  of answering phone calls.

• Website hosting: After creating your site, a Web service firm will
  place it in a server which is connecting to the Internet 24 hours
  a day to serve your visitors. A server is simply a computer, but
  it's more powerful than your ordinary computer which contains all
  necessary network connections to process your site information and
  users' requests. Your Web service company often takes care of this
  Web hosting for you. Depend on how much power and space your site
  needs, it will recommend an appropriate hosting plan for your site.
  Initially, many new websites don't require much power and space.
  A low-end server is capable to store and handle 200 new websites
  easily; that's why the costs of Web hosting aren't significant for
  many sites. As your site grows with more visitors, more Web pages,
  or more features, you may have to upgrade your Web hosting plan
  to more powerful server(s) and more bandwidths. For example, a
  website with an average of 20,000 visitors a day, assume each
  visitor accesses 5 Web pages on average, may require an entire
  server to serve your visitors 100,000 Web pages a day and just
  for your site only. At the cost in the low hundreds of dollars,
  leasing a whole server is still a bargain if your site's making
  money or achieves its goal.

• Use only Web service firm that can design search-engines-friendly
  Web pages to help search engines indexing your website. If not,
  you may have to hire another Web service company to re-design
  your entire website when you need search engine promotion in the
  future.

• If you need to update or add contents to your website
  constantly, consider installing a content management system
  that allows you and your staff to edit, add, or remove site
  contents. The cost of creating a custom content management
  system from scratch is high because a Web developer needs to
  create custom programs and design databases, but later on,
  you'll be able to add and edit tens of thousands of Web pages
  easily by yourself without technical knowledge; therefore, in
  a long run, it's cost-effective. Talk to your Web service
  firm about this cost saving method if it's right for you.

Article: So you want a website? And ways to reduce costs
By John Nguyen and Associates