How to Make a Website That is not Just to Make Money

Elizabeth Thistle

7 years ago

So, you want a website. Maybe you consider your business big enough to have its own page on the internet, or you are making a startup and need a website for promotion. If you hire a professional web-designer, you will get a great result. However, not everyone can afford that. Luckily, you are not the first to seek cheap website building opportunities.

Here are some hints to sufficiently reduce the final cost of a site.

Level 1: Three things that devour your budget

#1. Hosting

The first thing that needs money investment is a place where your site will be hosted. The monthly price is low - from $2 to $10. For example, a Bluehost monthly subscription costs $4.95. However, every penny counts so that you can find completely free hosting, like 000webhost.com, freehosting.com, awardspace.com or infinityfree.net. However, each of them has some disadvantage. For example, some quantity of advertisements placed on your page. Nothing secures a website that is hosted for free – the host could delete it every minute if he would like to. When using free hosting, be sure to read the fine print carefully.

#2. Domain

On the paid hostings (like Bluehost) you will get a free domain of your choice for a year. Some free hostings assign site owners their free domains that look like http://www.somehosting.com/yourgratesite or http://yourcoolsite.somehosting.com. You won’t have to pay anything for this assigned domain, but such site URL will be a disaster for marketing. Raising your position in search results would be tough. If you want to create a commercial platform, it is highly recommended to buy at least a .co domain that is a low-cost one. Who would believe that your company is a respectable one if you don’t even have your unique URL?

#3. Design

This is the most expensive part. If you have no coding skills, you have two options: hire a professional or use a content management system like WordPress. A developer will make you a site of any level of complexity. The more original design and functionality you want – the more expensive a site would be. The main advantage is that you don’t have to do anything for yourself except controlling the conditions execution. It would also be wise to insist on getting a daily report about the results. The work with distant executors could be disappointing if you don’t know what’s going on. However, we are talking about saving money here, so it would be much cheaper to build a website on WordPress. You don’t need specific skills – most of the web templates are easy to install and use. All you have to do is find the most fitting one and customize it to your needs. You can even find free templates. They are simpler versions of paid ones with a sufficiently lower level of functionality, but if your budget is minimal – that’ll do.

Level 2: Further saving

There are more little secrets how to reduce the price of the site for both variants – whether you choose to hire a developer or build a website using content management system. However, a unique site, made by a professional, will be expensive one way or another, so let’s talk about templates.

Something to look at

People love astonishing images. If your site hypnotizes visitors with high-quality photos, witty logo and sharp pictures – it will be popular. It is not a problem to get images if you are a professional photographer, but what could all other people do? Stocks provide photos and pictures of incredible quality and beauty, but once again, they are paid. Luckily, there are free stocks of images like StockSnap, Pexels or Unsplash.

Something to read

Content on the site is vital for delivering your message and for SEO. If you feel the power to combine words - the cheapest way to get content will be writing it for yourself. It will be easy if your writing skill is above average, but if not – you will need a copywriter. Outsourcing companies are providing the most reasonable prices that will help you to save another part of the budget.

Sales

Different marketplaces often perform sales for some of their products. Black Fridays, Christmas and Easter sales and other promotions will be a perfect chance to buy a template or other web-product for a lower price. Check marketplaces news and be ready for action.

Level 3: Bundles

Some companies create packages of products which is not only convenient for a user, but also sufficiently cost-saving. Bundles are a master level of thrift. They hold different sets of products according to their purpose and cost sufficiently less than a collection of same products consumed separately.

TemplateMonster recently started to make its own bundles. The last one is an Ultimate Startup Bundle. It is intended for inexperienced developers that would like to start their internet business project. The bundle holds all that is needed to build a website from the ground up. Bestselling, highly appreciated templates, mockups, graphics, and icons – everything that is useful for a beginner developer.

The bundle is already available, and from 29 January to 5 February, it will cost only $99!

Just think about it - consumed separately, it would cost about $523.

This means 81% would be saved.

K-k-k-combo!

Don’t miss the chance!

What Do They Say About Bundles?

What I've found that makes a bundle useful:

Thematically linked bundles. When you buy a bundle that 20 fonts, 12 illustrations, a half dozen infographics, two instagram templates, and a powerpoint deck, you will guaranteed only use, like, 3 items from the bundle. Depending on the bundle, you may be cool with that. If you buy 9 isometric illustrations because you need some isometric art for a website, even if you only really need one or two pieces of that bundle, odds are as you do more work on that website, you'll find a use for many more pieces.

Functionally-linked bundles. You're also more likely to make use of two dozen Photoshop Lightroom presets (if you use any, that is) than you are to use a bundle of a half a hundred random vector illustrations.

Use it for inspiration. I have 287 gigs of design bundle-related content on my external hard drive. A lot of that is not great for any finished product. But even when I don't want to use 36 different themed watercolor paintings in my SaaS startup website, I find that browsing through the thousands of files on the drive can be a source of inspiration

Keep it organized. It's a pain in the butt, but when you buy a 500 file bundle, go through once you've downloaded all of the assets and group the fiiles semantically and put them into folders where you can find them again in 2 years. It's no good if you kind of remember that you have 6 really cool retro robot illustrations that would be dope on the new company shirt you're designing if you can't find the files. Take 20 minutes now to do future you a favor and save future you 4 hours of fruitless searching.

Mix & Match. After a while, if you are a serial bundle purchaser like I am, you'll have a crazy accumulation of design assets. If you've been organizing them by utility instead of by purchase, you can really start to mix and match design assets across bundles and across themes to create fresh new ideas fast.

Trevor

Although we have a dedicated, in-house designer, I hate to bother her with small jobs--things like icons for transactional emails or stock-like images for print. As a result, I've bought dozens of font and icon bundles over the years. The paid version of Flaticon (we're not affiliated with them except as a customer) pays for itself after an hour. Having a stable of one-use fonts is handy too, and a site like Behance (also no relationship other than a customer) gives real-use samples of their font bundles, so you don't waste money on fonts that look awful when you scale them up.

Mike Catania, Founder and CTO Promotioncode.org
mike@promotioncode.org | Cell/Text: (850) 443-0162
Twitter: @PromotionCode (personal: @chompy)