Cost savings for a website
A website can unexpectedly require some investment, as a website is often made up of many different parts, each with their own associated costs. From paying for the cost of advertising your website or business, to maintaining the website itself, to the cost of creating content.
A website for a business that is just starting out, a freelance website, or a simple hobby project can therefore be quite costly. However, with a few clever tricks and a little more homework, you can save a lot of money. Let's take a look at some of the ways you can save a lot of money when creating and running your website!
Develop the website yourself
Developing a website yourself is often a great way to save money. Of course, building a website yourself isn't for every situation. But with today's tools like WordPress, Joomla and others, you can easily create a website with existing themes and minimal experience. The only thing you need to create your own website is the patience to sit down and do certain things. And to be able to calmly look at an error message without panicking. Because sometimes when creating a website, not everything goes according to plan.
Fortunately, there is an extensive knowledge base available to help you with many questions, with the help of extensive screenshots and even a short video. For WordPress specifically, there's a lot you can find on other sites that explain in detail how things work. And there are even entire courses on YouTube.
So time is the biggest investment you can make if you're building the site yourself.
Choose an open source and free theme
As mentioned in our last blog post, you can also save money by choosing a free and open source theme. Many themes have an annual fee that must be paid to receive updates. Or they require a one-time investment to ensure your site can use them. A lot can be accomplished with a solid free theme, and your website can look spiffy without too much effort. For example, with one of Anders Norén's free themes for WordPress, you can create a perfect website for your freelance work, a portfolio, a blog, or a corporate website. Without having to pay for it right away or always being confronted with an offer for a pro version. That's fine.
Write your own content and make a plan for it
Another big investment in your website is content, because almost every website needs to have content. Whether it's written, video, or images. With this content, you make it clear what your website is about. Or why a customer should choose your company. Websites have content in different formats, but also in different amounts. A simple website for a business that serves only as a business card only needs to include an introduction, compelling text, and the necessary information a customer needs. However, if you are launching a blog or a website with written content, such as a news website, this is no longer necessary. You have to decide whether to write all the content yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
With your own business website, there are many benefits to investing time in a blog as well, as this can bring in new customers. Or on the other hand, reach a larger audience. Also, you can often focus on more keywords that you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach. More on this in the next section.
SEO instead of direct mail
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, makes your website appear better in the search results of search engines like Google. The goal is often to rank #1 for your most important search term. In most cases, however, this no longer works in such black and white. Search results are becoming more personalized, and it takes constant attention to make sure your website can be found well.
What search engine optimization can mean for your website, however, is that once your website appears in higher positions in search results, visitors will click on it. And with that comes the biggest advantage of SEO, you don't have to pay per click for it. It doesn't have to be paid per click like ads do.
This also means that you are not alone with your website, every other company in the same industry is working to improve it. So the amount of work is often greater than with ads. But of course, you don't have to pay a bill for it every month. That's a big advantage, of course.
Plan certain things for yourself, avoid problems, and thus avoid costs.
Important with any website you start or want to start is also its maintenance. With any website you have to deal with updates that need to be installed. Messages that need to be updated, backups that need to be written and checked. And so on and so forth. If you have a website, it is important that you put certain things on the agenda and take responsibility for maintaining it. Not only for the success of the website, but also for its security.
