Getting Your Website Built the Cheap Way
Can "do it yourself" replace custom-designed websites?
Professional web design and hosting businesses can custom build your site, but you must be prepared to dish out an upfront set-up fee, plus ongoing monthly maintenence charges. Your other options are to get it freelanced, or to do it yourself. What is the cheap way to do this? Which will be your best investment?
First, you must understand that design companies make their living based on what they can charge. Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper classified ad sections that offer a 5-page website at $500? These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they have to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads: office rent, designer’s wages, advertising costs and so on. That being said, a reputable company gets its favorable word of mouth by delivering good value in a timely fashion. To survive, they have to operate on win-win.
It might be wise to check into finding freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it’s a “no-brainer” choice.
However, choose freelancers with care. The best way to do this would be to go to elance.com. There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured.
Another route you can take is to design your website yourself. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. You’ll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.
Another WYSIWYG option is Wordpress. While it has a substantial learning curve (as do these other programs), but can have you up and running in a short time. You may want to learn on a free blogging site, such wordpress.com, which uses the same back-end. Once you've learned your way around the interface, you can then set up your own dedicated hosting and build your site with a Wordpress engine.
However, the time you spend learning how to design websites on your own will be time taken away from running your business and earning income. Time is definately money. If there are some terms like FTP, CSS, and others we've mentioned that are unfamiliar to you - it might be time to get a freelancer or hiring an all-in-one company to take care of this back-end and monthly maintenence for you.
