Its no secret that the internet is one of the most effective ways to operate a business these days. Its cost effective and can bring in tons of money. Think of your website as your “online office”, if you had a real office where your business ran you would definitely make sure it looked great and professional, you wouldn’t want potential customers being turned away just because of what your office looks like. A website is exactly the same, a professional design that isn’t too “busy” is what you need, you want the visitor to visit the page and within seconds he or she should be able to tell exactly what the website is offering. If he or she cant tell straight away then chances are they will leave the site and you have then lost a potential customer.
There are many different types of web design such as static websites, dynamic websites, E commerce websites, CMS websites and flash websites. Most of the time a static website is used as its the simplest form of web design and is generally all a company needs to have their presence known online. If you were running a website that sells products online you would need an E commerce website, if you have a website that you would be adding new content to frequently the best choice would be a CMS website as CMS websites are designed to make it very easy to add content.
One also needs to make sure their website contains “clean” code and is SEO ready so that it ranks high in the search engines which will then bring you potential business. There is nothing more that a search engine hates more than a website with bad coding. This tells the search engine your site is unprofessional and probably isn’t a site people would be interested in.
Websites may either be used for:
- Personal Use
- Business use
- Educational Use
- Government use
- Non profit use
Cost of web design?
This varies a lot as there are many factors involved.
How many pages will the site need? What type of website is it? What kind of website design are you looking for?
Generally a static site would be the cheapest and an E commerce site or flash site the most expensive and they often need Adwords Management to drive traffic. With an E commerce site you also need to take into consideration you would need an SSL certificate, this costs about R500, this is vital for an online business as it protects your customers private information, without as SSL certificate chances are no one is going to feel comfortable entering their personal information on your site.
Once your website design is complete you then need web hosting. There are many different companies that offer great web hosting, one I would recommend is gridhost.co.za, in my opinion they are the most affordable and most professional web host available in South Africa. When looking at the different hosting packages you first need to decide how busy your website is going to be? How big the website is going to be?
If its just a simple design with a few pages that wont get more than a few hundred visitors a day then usually the smallest hosting package would be perfect, If your site is a big E commerce store with tons of content and thousands of visitors daily then you would need one of the larger hosting packages. The best thing to do would be to contact the host and ask them for assistance.
Remember that running a website is exactly like having a physical office, when it comes to spending money on your website you need to look at it as a great investment. Getting a cheap looking website designed with bad Search engine optimization is a waste of time. Getting a great site designed that dominates the search engines and gets tons of traffic can help your business expand at an incredible rate. If you want your business to succeed online you need to be willing to put the money and effort into it.