It’s a complicated time for Small Business owners when it comes to getting your company online, specifically with a website. I should first point out that this article is completely biased. I have created a business model of building affordable websites for small businesses based solely on the fact that I believe websites such as Wix (and related) get small business owners caught up in a seemingly great website solution but often just as costly as any other hosting provider. I’m going to go through some points, keep them as brief as possible but essentially explain why I build website for the price I do, and how affordable it actually can be.
Graphic Design
Wix (and related platforms) have stock images. Thousands maybe, but they aren’t tailored to your business and they do nothing for localization and connection. While it may be for a brief time that customers are on your website its important they feel a local connection. It takes 5 minutes to pick a picture on Wix, and an hour for someone to take a picture you’ve taken (even on an iphone) and edit it in photoshop to make it suitable for a website. [ofcourse high quality photography is always preferred]
Domain and Banner Advertisements
The free option with Wix (and related) do not offer your own business domain. You have to pay to use www.yourbusiness.com as your website address. The free version also places advertisements for the Wix platform on your website that you cannot remove. It is critical for SEO (Search Engine Optimization = making sure your website shows up in google) that you are using your own domain. It also gives you an email address [email protected] which is much more professional.
The actual costs
Your business should have the following:
Domain Name – www.yourbusiness.com
A Google places account, analytics and webmaster tools (indexing) associated with your domain.
An email address that customers can contact you at.
Hosting (speedy and also enough bandwidth – the truth is very rarely does a small business go over bandwidth)
No Advertisements (It should be promoting only your business)
To achieve this with Wix or other similar platforms you are looking at atleast $8.00 a month (2 year contract) which equals $192 for two years.
That does not include your time in making your website. Sit a tradesman down who doesn’t use his computer often and you are probably looking at 5-10 hours (minimum) to get a website set up that looks like every other website on their platform. This is a very modest and conservative estimate, there are brilliant small business people who I have worked with who it would probably take longer simply because it takes a specific skillset to build a good website.
So there you have it.