What are the costs involved in making a website ?
There are various costs and tasks involved in setting up a website. I use open source technologies which anyone can learn and use themselves to do the same if you want to put in the time, money and energy. Creating a basic website involves the following:
- pay for a domain name and register ownership
- pay for hosting to host your website
- configure the hosting incoming and outgoing connections
- set up and configure email and database
- organise all the information and images you provide
- install the WordPress core on the hosting
- pay for a licensed theme
- configure the theme and the WordPress core for your purposes
- pay for and install relevant plugins
- input and typeset all the information and images
- install and configure security measures
- install and configure caching measures
- set up Google analytics reports and website metrics
You can do all these things yourself or you can pay for my experience and time to do these for you. Like any person in the trades you will need to pay for materials and time, but what you are also getting is experience and insight. All websites need to be kept up to date to ensure that it continues to be secure and conform to the current digital standards and some management is always involved.
Web designers use the web development tool GT Metrix to see what needs done on a website to bring it up to certain standards. It is a helpful benchmarking tool which allows you to compare different websites and see where work needs done. Along with Sucuri security benchmarking tool you can see the build quality of my work and compare what else is available.
I would encourage people to look at the various alternatives available and for those without a budget to spend, try some of the free blogs available. Unfortunately the free things which are available do not have the power of the products which are paid for – in search engine visibility terms but it can be useful for coordinating information in your physical locale.
Owning your own domain and having your own website confers considerable advantages and the full power of an independent WordPress installation, so it may be worth you paying to create your own website if you have the time to invest in learning. All that you need to either commission a website or create one yourself can be found under the toolkit found on the righthand sidebar.
Advice for those who want a website, if you have not got your content already organised you are not ready to start building a website. Spend time bringing together the text and images for the pages and posts which make up the website. I cannot help you generate the text describing your enterprise. Once you have produced this, that is the time to get in touch.
