A great website is an essential virtual asset; a vital component of online business success. Web users expect a great user experience from websites. Your website, therefore, needs to look professional, clean and present your business in the best light possible.
Three out of 4 web users who discover your business will judge your brand based on its online contents; so, not creating a good website could hurt your credibility. Thankfully, creating a great website can be done without hiring an expensive website designer. In order to create the best website possible on a budget, do these two things first:
- Set Website Goals
Before you begin designing your website, it is important to set goals. This is to ensure that your final design can match and contribute to the actualisation your business goals; for example, to sell more products or capture leads.
In the words of a leading web design agency in Dubai, it is important to invest in the planning stage of the website. This will ensure that
you have all the steps and strategies laid out to ensure a smoother designing process. By understanding what your business wants to achieve, you will be able to communicate the same to the designer in a much better way. This does have a major impact on the website’s UI and UX.
- Outline Your Budget
This is a no brainer — a well-defined budget will provide parameters for you to work with. In fact, if you overlook this step, you might end up spending more on building a website than anticipated. When defining your budget, make sure to consider all the moving parts of the process — marketing, web hosting, image/graphics, and domain name purchase.
What Is The Importance Of Selecting The Right Web Host When Creating A Website On A Budget?
- Your Website’s Security at Stake
The security of your website is easy to overlook. Its relevance is something that is typically only considered when it is too late. Just as you would buy a security system for your home to improve security or get insurance in the event of an accident, putting the necessary security measures in place is a good investment.
There is no 100% fail-proof method for protecting your website, but there are measures that can be put in place as a protective barrier around your website’s content, such as updating your website’s software regularly. Taking steps like this would be a moot point if your web hosting provider doesn’t consider security a priority. It can be likened to installing the best security system for your home because you have bad feeling to lock your back, front doors as well as your windows.
A great quality host will have measures in place like firewalls, frequent backup and other safety measures to protect your web server, website files and data centre. Even though you may be tempted to save money upfront by going with a cheap hosting provider, you would be hurting yourself in the long run if your web hosting provider doesn’t have a good track record. The credibility and reputation of a host should always be considered before a decision is made.
- Access to Quality Customer Support
Your website going offline is inconvenient — even though this may be as a result of an error by you, like mistakenly causing it to go offline while editing your site’s code. On some other occasion, it could be the fault of your host.
Whatever the case may be, when issues such as these occur, you would appreciate the help of a great support team. Attempting to fix the problem by yourself can be challenging if you do not have relevant technical skills. This is why a great web host is important as they always have great support.
- Optimised Site Performance
The loading time of your site and its overall performance will affect search engine rankings. If your site takes a long time to load, then bounce rate increase and horrible user experience is delivered to your website’s user. This could sometimes be because of an error on your part, such as a wrongly coded web page or failing to delete an outdated plugin; but in most instances, poor site performance can be directly traced back to the quality of the web hosting service. Choosing the right web host would mean that your website is optimised to run fast and seamlessly all the time.
- Minimise the Loss of Revenue
If your website is intended to sell products or generate leads. then every moment your site is offline would cost you a lot of money. There are many reasons why your site could go offline, but one of the most popular ones is website downtime.
Uptime is how often your site is online and functional and downtime is the direct opposite. Choosing the right web host would ensure that your website is online 99.9% of the time (which is the industry standard). Choose a web hosting provider that offers a 99.9% uptime, so you can safeguard your revenue and business credibility. Bluehost, Heart Internet UK, Domains4Less and 1&1 IONOS come easily recommended.
Three Affordable Website Design Solutions
- Hire A Student: Hiring a web design student is a great budget-friendly website creation option. A lot of web design students will welcome the experience and will not charge as much as a professional. In some instances, some of them might be willing to work for free to boost their resume. However, it is good practice to offer some type of compensation to any students designing your website.
- Hire A Professional: Even though this is often an expensive solution, there are some professional web designers who are affordable. A great way to find affordable professional website designers is to search for freelancers or designers from other countries who are willing to charge a small fee – especially when compared to a design firm. It is best to relay your budget upfront and get their feedback. You would be pleasantly surprised at the fee of some good web designers.
- Do-it-yourself websites design: If you would take up the challenge, there are a lot of websites builders that you can use to quickly create a website; particularly if you have the basics down. However, you would have to study the platform and builder you select to get the best results, so you can understand how to fully utilise the features provided.
