Website development and maintenance is a huge industry. There are individuals as well as organizations that offer web development services. The prices charged by these individuals or companies depend on the demand and competition that they face in the market. Trends in this industry keep changing, depending on the tools and software available to ease the web development job, and several other factors as well.
Since having a website for your brand has become almost like a necessity, website development has become a norm for every business. Businesses nowadays do not have an option anymore to build a website for representing their products and services. They need to have at least a basic landing page that showcases what they are offering.
That’s why web development cost has become a hot topic. Even large organizations that have a huge budget allocated for marketing prefer to save money or costs of website development. They would rather do their research properly to try to reduce the overall development costs, than rush into hiring someone who costs them a fortune. People who have a little bit of know-how of the technical world make smart decisions with regards to accepting the costs of the website that they get someone to build for their business.
Are you one of those who have been asking yourself, how much does it cost to make a website? If yes, then this post is absolutely for you. While we cannot define the exact costs of website development, we can give you some pointers or ways that will help you reduce your overall development costs.
7 Ways to Reduce Your Web Development Cost
Here are 7 strategies to help you minimize the costs of website development for your business.
1. Use a Premade Template
In the olden days, your web design needed to be created from scratch. You can still do that if you want, but there are easier options available these days too. Many companies or individuals create sample web designs and sell them as website templates. These templates are ready to use and save your web development cost. All you need to do is select the template that you think is most appropriate for your business, and start keying in your web content into it.
In most cases, a person or a firm selling website templates bundles them up and sells them as packages, along with other services pertinent to website development, via cloud-based software, a tool, or a platform.
Take the example of Strikingly. We have a lot of website templates that anybody who signs up for a free account with us can access, select, and use for building a website for their business. Our templates are responsive, appealing, and easy to use. On top of that, we have different types of templates for different types of websites.
For example, if you want to build a blog with reduced web development costs, you can choose one of our blog templates.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you want to build an online store with minimal costs of website development, you can select one of the eCommerce templates that we have, which are built in a style that enable you to upload your product photos, write down your product descriptions, and select a payment gateway to be able to receive payments from your customers.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Use Free Images
If you shoot or create unique pictures for your website, you will be consuming a lot of time and effort in the process. It will probably also cost you a substantial amount of money. If you already have your product photos and other pictures to showcase on your site, that’s another story though. You won’t have to spend so much money creating new pictures, as long as the ones you have are of good quality and are suitable for the web pages you will be using them on.
The best thing to do to save your web development cost is to use images that are accessible to you for free. There are many websites that offer free images. Whether you use vector art or stock photography, you can find a website that offers free images of these types. Even if you use the paid images from these websites, they will still cost you less than designing your own vector images or snapping and editing your own photographs. The subscription price of such websites is usually less than $20 a month, with unlimited access to all their paid images.
3. Build Less Web Pages
When you are creating a website for your business, it is good to keep it short and precise, at least in the beginning. This helps in reducing your web development cost. This means you can cut down on the number of pages that you build. Many businesses these days start off with a single page website, which looks very professional and easy to navigate. All the basic information needed by any of the business’s prospects can be found on that one page.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
In the Strikingly free plan, you can easily create a one-page, fancy-looking, and user-friendly website with minimum overall development costs. The responsive menu allows your site visitors to go directly to any section of the page by simply clicking on the section’s name on the menu bar.
4. Keep the Content Simple
You can create different forms of content to key in on your site once the web design is ready. Modern businesses like to keep their website content simple, precise, and clear. They do not use long and boring paragraphs that are full of jargon and too monotonous for anyone to want to read.
The good news is that using simple content helps you keep your web development costs low. This is because when you write short and precise, you have to spend less time building up your content. Moreover, simple content uses a combination of text, images, and videos. This means you have to write less and fill up the remaining spaces with your images and videos.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Images and videos help keep your site visitors engaged, while at the same time, requiring less time and effort to upload or embed on your part. If you are using Strikingly to build your website, you can easily add videos to your web pages. This reduced effort really contributes to reducing the costs of the website.
Some businesses or people might think that posting sophisticated content would make their website look more professional. In reality, that only complicates your web development process. If you only include the most important web features that you need, your web development cost will be relatively low.
5. Reuse Content From Your Old Website
If this is not the first time you are building a website for your business, there is nothing wrong with curating and reusing the content from your old website, for the sake of saving time and overall development costs. You can edit, modify or update the content if you want, but you can save a lot of time by taking pieces or paragraphs from the same old content that you write and use it on your new website.
Many companies believe in making everything brand new when they get someone to develop a new website for them. But this is really not necessary. As long as parts of your old website content are still relevant to your business today, you can go ahead and simply use it again.
Go through your old or existing website and sort out parts of the content that you would like to keep. You will most likely find a lot. Then you can add a little bit of new content as well, to give your site a boost for its search engine placements. This process will reduce your web development cost.
6. Take on the Work Yourself
With the help of website-building platforms, you can actually develop an entire website on your own, without having to write a single line of code. Even if you have zero programming knowledge or coding skills, you can create a complete website on Strikingly yourself and save your web development cost. You will not need to hire anyone and save all the money that you would otherwise have to pay a web developer.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Our users on Strikingly don’t even need to worry about hiring someone for their website’s maintenance. We provide 24/7 live chat support to guide you in any technical difficulties of making and maintaining your site. This not only helps to keep your web development cost low but also gives you the freedom and flexibility to edit or update your website on your own any time you like.
If you are interested in building a low-cost website for your business, you can sign up for a free account on Strikingly, and start building your landing page all by yourself. We are happy to see our users establish a solid online presence for their brand with the help of the tools and features provided on our platform.
