A professional-looking website is one of the surefire ways to establish your reputation online. This is why every business looking to reach its target audience should invest in a high-quality website. But you cannot deny that building one is expensive.
The project will require you to work with a couple of professionals with experience. You will need to find a user experience (UX) designer, a web page designer, and a web developer. But the job does not end with the finished product. You will still need to test the site and optimize it for search engines with search engine optimization specialists.
Nevertheless, some things will help you keep the costs of your website project down:
Go for a template
If you are building a simple corporate website without any e-commerce functionalities, it’s wise to use platforms that have existing templates. The likes of Wix and WordPress are user-friendly and easy to customize. Templates will help you do away with a substantial amount of design work, which obviously costs money. If you want to use a platform with e-commerce components, try the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce.
Reduce the number of pages
Your website’s overall cost will heavily depend on the number of pages your designers and developers will work on. Easily, the more pages you have, the more amount of work involved. And that means you will need to pay more. If you have pages in your initial requirements that your website can live without, drop them. For example, your company’s extensive history that might require more than two pages can come later. Focus on what’s important, such as the pages that talk about your business’ products, services, contact details, and how your brand has changed lives.
Use stock photographs
A picture can speak a thousand words. This is a common philosophy that business owners and designers apply to their websites. They use photographs to counterbalance the text, add visual value, and provide context. Unless you are placing actual pictures of products online, photography shoots are not always necessary. To avoid shoot costs, you can just use stock photographs. Go for images that are professionally done and edited. You can also go to royalty-free photography websites, such as Unsplash and Pixabay.
Leave some of the work to internal employees
Not all website project-related work needs to be delegated to third-party suppliers. You can save money and time by leaving some assignments to your internal team. For one, if you have an in-house graphic artist, you can drop out the images that the web designers will use. Your in-house writers can work on the website copy so that you will not need to hire a content or digital marketing agency.
Before Anything Else: Know Your Needs
If you really want to save big on your website project, you need to know your primary needs and business objectives. This will help you outline which kind of services you will have to avail of and which tasks are better left to your team.