How every budget can get you a website
It seems expensive. All that fancy typography and the flash navigation bar and the beautiful imagery. Even the most basic blog layout can look like it cost thousands, and it’s possible that it did. You can literally spend as much as you want on web designers, a development team and, if you’re really going all out, a brand team to work on your logo and messaging as well. Of course, not everyone is one of the three richest people in the world (in fact, most people aren’t, that’s just simple maths, people), so if you are looking to start a website and don’t want to spend more than a few hundred dollars, there are options out there that won’t leave a giant hole in your bank balance.
A WordPress website Vs The custom made websites
If you can’t afford to hire a development team, the simplest (and cheapest) thing to do is to go and find yourself a website builder with some hosting included. These sites are easy to use and can have your site set up in seconds (well, minutes). WordPress remains the world’s go-to site builder. This is largely because their software is open source, so anyone can build tools for them. The WordPress community stands at a formidable 60 million users. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to use. It’s easy to setup, but if you really want to start customising everything, things can get a little tricky. The biggest alternative to WordPress is probably Squarespace. Squarespace has one big difference to its WP alternative, it is not open source, so only their developers can make significant changes to how it works. It does tend to be a little more user friendly, so it’s potentially a good starter pack before graduating to the school of WordPress later.
Costings for a website
Once you’ve decided which site you wish to use, you’ll then have to worry about how it looks. The most cost-effective thing to do is to shop around for a premium theme that you like the look of, which will also fit in with the type of site you are going for. A premium theme for WordPress will set you back $50 – $200. If you want to have one built from scratch it will be closer to $1000. Of course, there is also the possibility that one of the free themes from WordPress will suffice. Squarespace works slightly differently in that you pay a monthly fee for everything (including hosting) and depending on what you pay, you get access to a variety of features. The price ranges from $12 – $40 a month and the quality of themes available do vary quite a bit in terms of quality.
Of course, WordPress and Squarespace aren’t the only two options available, Wix and Weebly, are just two other reasonably priced alternatives that can help you set up a swish new site in no time. It all just depends on how much traffic your site will see and what topics your site will be dealing with.