Small businesses and startups often seek affordable websites — but what makes a website “affordable”? How do you set a website budget?
In fact, it mainly depends on whether it’s a personal site, or a business site.
Why? Because whilst personal websites often cost money, successful business websites do not. In fact, contrary to the hype of DIY platforms and cut-price cowboys, a cheap business website can easily cost you more than a professional one.
How To Budget For A Personal Website
Personal websites aren’t built to make money. So traffic isn’t their priority, and even if monetised with ads or affiliate income, that isn’t their key goal. They aren’t expected to pay for themselves. They also often depend on “bootstrapping” — personal funding from savings, friends and family.
Everyone loves cheap web design — until they learn that it takes far more than low prices and fancy graphics to build a business website that works. That can be a hard lesson about cheap web design risks, but it often gets worse. Because cheap web designers often disappear.
Here’s a great example of why automating updates in WordPress is only smart for non-business websites. As I write this, one of the WP plugins published by Facebook just released an update with invalid code.
There’s a lot of confusion about the difference between a web designer and a web developer. That’s a problem when you’re trying to decide which to hire. However, assuming they’re both the same can cause even bigger problems.