Top
building-website-watch-5-hidden-costs

Building A Website? Watch Out For These 5 Hidden Costs

We give you 5 hidden costs that affect your website for small businesses.

Website Infrastructure
This is perhaps the most important factor that determines how much you will spend to run your website. Today, there are many options when it comes to building your website. However, if you do not make the right choice, it can be shown as an expensive line, as you’ll see below.

Here are the different ways to set up your website:

Build a custom web page from the base – that means you have to hire professional developers and developers to build a complete website and it can cost you thousands of dollars just for starters. Many do not work anymore unless you want to do business with customized site requirements.

Use Content Management System – You can also use free content management systems like WordPress that provides you with all the tools you need to build your site.
However, you will need to hire professionals to set up and customize your site. It costs about $ 500-1000 each year, which includes the costs of developers and hosting fees.

Use Website Builder – There are many automated sites like Vik, Squarespace and Weebly that allow you to quickly build your website using the drag & drop interface. In this case, you do not need a developer team to create or run a website. You can buy your site and run for only $ 5 a month. All you have to do is spend a couple of hours on YouTube, learn how to use one of these sites and you should be good. This is undoubtedly the most relevant option.

Design
If you want to attract visitors and turn them into paying customers, you have to make your page look good.
Here are four design-related costs that you need to manage when starting your site.

Logos and Graphics – If you do not have previous design experience, you can get your own logos and graphics designed for at least $ 5, at Fiverr or Upwork. If you enjoy the design of things, you can try free online design tools such as Canva or LogoMakr.

Pictures – Unless you have the luxury of professionals to engage in image editing, you can use free images from sites like Unsplash or Pikabai. Some of them may require you to hide your photo while using your images.

Website Design Templates – This is one of the highest costs in the creation of a website. If you hire designers to customize your paid template, it can cost more than $ 300.

However, if you want to build your website from the beginning, then it will cost at least $ 5,000. On the other hand, all embedded sites such as Vik, Squarespace and Weebly provide a large library of free templates for the design. Most of them are as good as paid templates. Even if you hire designers to put your website, it will cost you less than $ 100, because it will use the drag and drop interface instead of encrypting it yourself.

The content
When your website is designed, you will need to fill in the content so that visitors to your site can understand your business, to see your products and read blog posts. Typically, there are 2 types of content that you will need to launch your website:

Web Content – It consists of the entire textual content that is present on different pages of your site – whether it’s your home page, a page about us or a product page. Includes every text on your site – your tagline, subtitles, product features, benefits, frequently asked questions and more. This involves little creative skills to write a convincing copy. So, if you have a small 3-5 page web site, you can hire a professional to create web content for you. They charge around 250-300 dollars for at least three pages, with a cheaper rate for additional pages.
Blog Content – It can be very expensive to outsource your blog content, starting at $ 25 per blog post, especially if you start and you do not know what your audience likes to read. This will help you get tons of content for free until you find out which topics have a resonant with your readers.
Email Templates – If you want your subscribers and users to read their emails, then you have to make them good. However, when you start, do not go to paid email templates (cost – $ 15). You can apply for e-mail marketing platforms such as MailChimp & Aweber, which offer tons of nicely designed, professional-looking e-mail templates, absolutely free …

Automation tools and accessories
There are many automated tools and add-ons that make it easy for you to manage and promote your website when it’s built. However, technology has become so flawless that you may not know how to add the costs to your business.

Make a list of all paid tools and add-ons you use to manage your business – from collaboration tools and services like Slack to email marketing solutions such as MailChimp to social media management tools such as HootSuite. Even record the operating systems of your laptops. All these tools give you the cost of your small business. Find out if they have good open-source alternatives. Is there an alternative to open source for Slack? What do you think about replacing Windows with Ubuntu?

In fact, our technology costs dropped by 32% when we replaced most of our paid software with their open-source alternatives.

Maintenance and updates
When your website starts and runs, you will need to periodically run maintenance and upgrades. They can be in the form of software updates and security patches or even new website design. You will also need expert help every time the page breaks. If you do not determine these costs, they can quickly increase their operational costs.

If you choose to create a custom page from scratches, then you can get real problems. What happens if developers who have built your site leave or can not be available? Your new developers may find it hard to understand and correct your website and may charge you additional fees.

If you’ve built your website using WordPress, then you’ll have to hire a developer to fix your site every time it breaks or whenever you want to make any updates. A good programmer can cost from $ 80 to $ 180 per hour.

Fully embedded Web sites like Vik allow you to install updates with just one click and you have a dedicated, 24 × 7 support team to help you troubleshoot. That’s why they are a great option for people who do not have much technical knowledge or are new to building web pages.

If you take care of the above-hidden costs, you will be able to smoothly start your business and
use savings in other important areas such as marketing and employment.