For a business that is just starting up, one minimizing your costs is to develop your web site for free (or at least as cheaply as possible), rather than spending large sums of your limited funding on a website builder.
There are various ways of building your site at zero or minimal cost. These include using a free website hosting package that includes a website builder, using free website builders supported by adverts or using free to use or open source software.
Many website building software packages have been created and developed which let you make your own website for free. These include free website builder software packages such as Yola and others.
They give you all the resources you need to create a simple website including a website builder, web hosting and various designs. In many cases however, if you want to use your own domain, you will need to pay the yearly cost for that, usually for less than $10 – i.e. if you want myshoes.com rather than myshoes.websitehost.com
The issue that can ariseis that these web hosts often brand your website with their banner or logo, sometimes quite prominently. This is not really ideal for a professional business website as you probably prefer your clients to not think you are too cheap to pay for your own website.
In addition, many of these systems are free only since the hosts reduce the facilities they make available to you such as how much web site space they make available to you, how many files you can upload, how many web sites you can place on your hosting, and the number of designs they make available for you to use for free.
Often the hosts give you premium (non-free) packages with a broader, and better facilities with the expectation that you will eventually opt for a paid package. You may find a website builder to provide you with a web site package that is not at all restricted in the facilities you can access. In such cases they often get back the money they lose on hosting by advertising on your website. This means the more traffic your website can get, the more money they can make. The problem with this is that you have little or no means of restricting which adverts are displayed on your website so the ads could be irrelevant adverts, adverts contrary to your website’s objectives e.g. advertising alcohol on a site about breaking addictions, or even adverts posted by your competitors that could lead to you losing sales.
Another solution to consider is using Open Source Software on a free or trial website hosting package.
Open source website builders are free software packages sometimes created by groups of software developers working co-operatively and at other times by companies wishing to introduce a product to market by introducing a free less powerful version in the hope that you will upgrade at some point in time as your requirements increase or just as a way to test their concepts.
The good news is that open source software is not bad just because it is free. Often, the quality is quite high as it gets to be tested by millions of users and bugs are corrected. Examples include Joomla and Drupal’s Content Management systems and WordPress’s publishing package.
Some open source software creators give you the software for free but charge you if you need extra support.
To utilise open source software you need to have a website hosting package. These were in past times moderately expensive, but now you can get hosting offers at just $10 per year while some suppliers even offer you free hosting for a whole year.
Using your own hosting rather than that given by by free website builders means you have control over your domain (website name) and the software you use to build your website. For example you could decide to try different software or change your websites purpose entirely and make it into an blog.
Usually open source designers will provide you with a simple means of installing their products without you needing to have any advanced technical knowledge, for example, WordPress’s 10-minute installation routine, while some website hosts even provide a software wizard which makes installation even easier e.g. 1-click installation.
In conclusion, you can create your own website for free with a free website builder or use open source software for little or no cost and save your business some money while getting a full featured website as good looking as one created for you by a website designer.