It is no secret that it is absolutely crucial to have a website for your business – you need it to build your brand, you need it for marketing, you need it to attract more customers, and you need it to expand to other places.
The benefits of having a website are immeasurable, but what are the costs? Can you afford to get a website for your business? Do the benefits make up for the costs?
This article will help you answer these questions.
What’s the Scope of the Website?
The biggest upfront cost you’ll have to incur is the cost of building the website, and this is mainly determined by what you require from the website, how complex is the design, and how many features do you plan to implement:
- The complexity of the design: how many landing pages do you want the website to include? How intricate are the animations? How detailed do the graphics need to be? These are all aspects of the design that will have a large influence on the final price of the website. Of course, this isn’t completely under your control, and depending on the type of your business, your needs will vary. For example, if you’re running a physical shop and want to allow people to browse your items online, you need to ensure the items are presented in the best possible light and the design is chic but also simplistic.
- The features implemented: you obviously need to implement some features on the website to make full use of it. Most businesses won’t need a website that just statically displays some information forever. You might want your clients to post feedback, you might want them to comment, you might want them to be able to renew their subscription online, and much more. All of these are features that you need to implement on the website before it is ready for wide use.
- How much traffic your website is going to get: in the long run, the major cost of having a website will be the cost of running it. This completely depends on how many users visit your website, how much time they spend there, and the activities they perform. For example, if your website had 30,000 concurrent visitors, you need a very powerful server to ensure the site is responsive for all of them, and this means increased costs. Even through cloud computing, you still need to pay more for more computing power needed to deliver your website. That’s why it is important to guesstimate the amount of traffic you’ll be getting to ensure you can estimate how much money you’ll need to keep your website running.
As you can tell, it is quite a complex process, and there are rooms for error. If you don’t have the necessary experience to sort things out and get this done, it is best to hire a development agency. For example, Acclaim.agency will help you come up with a good design and help you turn it into code – that means, they’ll help you from start to finish and you won’t need to worry about anything.
What Could I Possibly Gain from Having a Website?
Now, since you learned about all the costs involved in building and running a website, it is time to focus on the benefits as well – although they are too many to list and explain, here are the main benefits you’ll get from owning a website:
- Reaching more people: websites are the primary vehicle through which you can allow more people to find you. Not many people can come to visit your physical location, not many people will see your ad in the newspaper. The best way to ensure people get to find your business and know your services is by having a website. Showing up on search engines might potentially increase your revenue by more than 100%.
- Having an easier time growing: you’ll have a much easier time growing your business in the virtual world than in real life. If you want to offer your services in a new district or town, it takes money to open a new office there. But, virtually, the only thing you need to do is market your services in that town and you’ll be good to go. That’s why having a website gives you dynamism and competitiveness not easily replicated by other methods.
- Diversifying your sources of income: it is business class 101 to ensure your business doesn’t rely on a single source of income because the smallest thing could disturb that income and send your business into emergency mode. For example, if a lot of people decided to shop at your store because it was close to a bus stop, if the city municipality decided to change the location of that bus stop, you could be losing half of your revenue that simply. This is a single example of a myriad of problems you’ll face relying on a single revenue stream. That’s why ensuring you get steady revenue from your website is important – it acts as an additional revenue stream that’s not easily disturbed by external sources.
