Cost of running a small website
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
One of my previous post discuss on how to start your own website. This post will give you an idea on how much a website will cost you.
Small business owners realize the importance of putting up a website for better exposure of their product and/or service. Those who successfully staged their online presence enjoys the many benefits of having a website. Still, many are not doing websites; one of the many factors is the cost, not because they can't afford it, but because they don't have any idea on how much it cost. This post will focus on costs in running small websites suited for small businesses.
The cost of running a website can be categorized into two; setup cost and ongoing cost. Setup cost is the initial cost of having a website. It includes domain name registration, acquiring a web host, script installation, page design, and SSL certificate for e-commerce site. The actual amount of the setup cost depends on several factors. One example is whether you write your own script from scratch or use a pre-written script. Another is the type of website you need to run; is it an e-commerce site that will accept online transactions, a registration site that accepts membership, a blog or online journal, or simply a presentation of your products and services. Setting up a website needs some technical knowledge but if this is not your stuff, you can always hire someone to set it up for you. The cost of hiring a professional developer cannot be quantified easily. In this case, you may talk to someone who are offering website development services. The setup cost is usually equivalent to several years of ongoing cost.
Ongoing cost can be break further into two parts; maintenance cost and promotional cost. Maintenance includes your domain name renewal, web hosting renewal, SSL certificate renewal for websites that accepts online payments, and script upgrade. The minimum period for domain name and SSL certificate renewal is yearly, web hosting is monthly, and script upgrade depends on security level of your website. We can easily quantify maintenance cost, a rough estimate of ±$50 a month will do for e-commerce website. Promotional cost has two faces: time and money. If you don't want to spend any single cent in promoting your website, you can optimize your pages for search engine and wait for the search engine to index your pages. Once your pages are indexed by search engines, if somebody searching for a keyword you used in your page, the searcher may land to your website. You can also join social sites like FaceBook and Twitter to promote your website. Social sites are very popular nowadays that you lose many potential costumers if you continue to ignore them. Another is by spending money to promote your website through online advertisement. You can use the most popular Google Adwords in promoting your website.
Updating your website in regular basis is a critical part of website promotion. Your website will be as good as dead if after 1 year of existence, you only have 5 pages online. I recommend you update it once a week, if your time cannot afford it, you can do that once a month. To update a website means to add another page of information to your existing website. You may announce your new product, the new security officer of your building, your discount rates, anything that will make your website alive and fresh. But of course, make it more relevant to what you offer. You can also hire writers to write an update for your website. There are many options to promote your website, and this topic is worth another blog post.
If you really need the amount of how much it cost to run a website, here is my very rough estimate. The cost may go up or down depending on the type of website you are going to run. In my rough estimate $350 initial cost may do. In this amount, you can simply talk to a web developer tell him what you want and if the $350 is reasonable for both of you, then you can set back, relax, and wait for the outcome. The monthly cost maybe around $50. Note however that the above costs are very rough estimates. You may be surprised with the difference from actual cost of running a website.
You may also like this post:
» Initial and Recurring Costs of Running Your Own Blog (Website)
» Cost of running a blog (Non-monetary cost)
One of my previous post discuss on how to start your own website. This post will give you an idea on how much a website will cost you.
Small business owners realize the importance of putting up a website for better exposure of their product and/or service. Those who successfully staged their online presence enjoys the many benefits of having a website. Still, many are not doing websites; one of the many factors is the cost, not because they can't afford it, but because they don't have any idea on how much it cost. This post will focus on costs in running small websites suited for small businesses.
The cost of running a website can be categorized into two; setup cost and ongoing cost. Setup cost is the initial cost of having a website. It includes domain name registration, acquiring a web host, script installation, page design, and SSL certificate for e-commerce site. The actual amount of the setup cost depends on several factors. One example is whether you write your own script from scratch or use a pre-written script. Another is the type of website you need to run; is it an e-commerce site that will accept online transactions, a registration site that accepts membership, a blog or online journal, or simply a presentation of your products and services. Setting up a website needs some technical knowledge but if this is not your stuff, you can always hire someone to set it up for you. The cost of hiring a professional developer cannot be quantified easily. In this case, you may talk to someone who are offering website development services. The setup cost is usually equivalent to several years of ongoing cost.
Ongoing cost can be break further into two parts; maintenance cost and promotional cost. Maintenance includes your domain name renewal, web hosting renewal, SSL certificate renewal for websites that accepts online payments, and script upgrade. The minimum period for domain name and SSL certificate renewal is yearly, web hosting is monthly, and script upgrade depends on security level of your website. We can easily quantify maintenance cost, a rough estimate of ±$50 a month will do for e-commerce website. Promotional cost has two faces: time and money. If you don't want to spend any single cent in promoting your website, you can optimize your pages for search engine and wait for the search engine to index your pages. Once your pages are indexed by search engines, if somebody searching for a keyword you used in your page, the searcher may land to your website. You can also join social sites like FaceBook and Twitter to promote your website. Social sites are very popular nowadays that you lose many potential costumers if you continue to ignore them. Another is by spending money to promote your website through online advertisement. You can use the most popular Google Adwords in promoting your website.
Updating your website in regular basis is a critical part of website promotion. Your website will be as good as dead if after 1 year of existence, you only have 5 pages online. I recommend you update it once a week, if your time cannot afford it, you can do that once a month. To update a website means to add another page of information to your existing website. You may announce your new product, the new security officer of your building, your discount rates, anything that will make your website alive and fresh. But of course, make it more relevant to what you offer. You can also hire writers to write an update for your website. There are many options to promote your website, and this topic is worth another blog post.
If you really need the amount of how much it cost to run a website, here is my very rough estimate. The cost may go up or down depending on the type of website you are going to run. In my rough estimate $350 initial cost may do. In this amount, you can simply talk to a web developer tell him what you want and if the $350 is reasonable for both of you, then you can set back, relax, and wait for the outcome. The monthly cost maybe around $50. Note however that the above costs are very rough estimates. You may be surprised with the difference from actual cost of running a website.
You may also like this post:
» Initial and Recurring Costs of Running Your Own Blog (Website)
» Cost of running a blog (Non-monetary cost)
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A website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path ('/') in an Internet Protocol-based network. You can visit slideklip.com for more information.
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