Having a website designed for your business is, at the best of times, an expensive proposition. It takes both time and skill to develop a website from scratch, and a lot more of both to make it actually good, which will, of course, cost money.
For businesses with limited funds, such as small and medium sized businesses and startups, the amount of money required to produce a high quality and bespoke website is just too exorbitant. Therefore, looking for and finding solutions which can give you a high quality website which suits your company’s needs is of paramount importance. If you’re reading this page, chances are you’re expecting to have this answered for you, so, allow us to meet your expectations:
The quickest and easiest way for those with limited funds to develop a business website is to use freely a available CMS. A CMS (content management system) is the “backend” of a website which allows you to manage the content of a website, and there are a lot out there. This website, for instance, is made using wordpress, but there is also woocommerce – a free ecommerce CMS ideal for businesses with small numbers of products (also a wordpress development), and magento, which is pretty similar to woocommerce but better able to deal with larger numbers of products.
You might be asking at this point what any of this has to do with your websites design, the “frontend”, and you’d be right to ask. Well, the advantage of these freely available CMS’s is that you have people developing “themes” for the mass market, which can be quickly added to the content management system to organise and style your website’s content, effectively giving you a ready made website design.
Themes are a great thing, and have a lot to offer businesses, but there are some requirements to make them really fit for purpose, and ensure they have value to their customers. The mark of a great theme is the availability of customisable options – anybody can go into the code and reorganise a feature here or there (well, a programmer can anyway), but what makes a theme valuable to a customer is that they can customise that website with little to no expertise; turning a standard default style into a more unique design, which reflects the customer’s individuality.
It is important to note at this point that even though you can take a theme and customise it to match your businesses needs, even the most user friendly management system for a theme can flummox people with no experience or aptitude for computers or design. At this point, it may be worth bringing in a design agency. This may cause you to roll your eyes, but bear with it, because by involving a design agency after this point, you can still make tremendous savings.
Agencies which specialise in designing wordpress websites, as an example, will be able to produce a website fit to a company’s specifications in a greatly reduced timeframe, thereby making the process cheaper in addition to making it faster. Although more money can be saved by doing the whole process in house, it will make the process longer, and if you value your time monetarily, more expensive too.