What is the right website for me / my business?

Your website defines you

The right website for me is a bold statement and the truth is a website may never be complete so may never be perfect. There’s a lot of choice these day’s and with that are a lot of decisions. The choices may seem non sensical but really they are all relatively straightforward.

E-Commerce

Is the right website for me an E-Commerce site? An E-Commerce site is a site that sells products. That’s it! There are many different products out there so there is no one size fits all solution. It’s even possible that no off the shelf E-Commerce solution fits, so you would look at a custom built solution. Typically you have four selling choices.

WooCommerce is a WordPress add on which converts WordPress into a fully capable E-Commerce option
Social media, Facebook and Instagram both have options to sell your items on their platforms directly
Another prebuilt platform such as Shopify or SquareUp
Custom built, made for you, as required

How much you might pay to get one of these solutions off the ground could be from completely free to many thousands of pounds. The social media options are usually the best for a small range of products and tend to be free or charge for advertising. If you are after something bigger or specific to you, it’s likely to cost £600 or more, examples of pricing can be seen on Professional Web Designs pricing page

WordPress

Would a WordPress site be the right website for me? This is a solution for nearly anyone in any industry. A staggering number of websites run WordPress and WordPress believe this is 42% of all websites! That is an insane number of websites running the same product!

What is WordPress?

It’s a blog website at its core but in reality, its an everything website. If you want a specific feature, chances are, someone else wanted it too and it’s probably been built as a plugin. Not everything is perfect but millions of people running these websites can’t be that wrong, right?

Typical WordPress sites are built between £200 and £1000. Make sure you know what you are getting before agreeing to let someone build a website for you. You can build your own from thirty or forty pounds a year. Obviously, this isn’t a preferred option for most but there are usually opportunities to get a hand in running a WordPress website after it’s been built, for example adding blog posts.

Wix

You may have seen it advertised, you may be wondering why you would choose other solutions when this is available. Well, maybe a Wix website is the right website for me then?

What is Wix?

Wix is a website builder which is all internet based, no code involved, very little setup and has some useful features built in.

You can add twitter feeds directly to your site, add or change pages and menu’s easily.

Wix is free to build with but as soon as you want anything slightly off the basics, for example your own website address, you have to pay for it on top of the cost of the domain. If you want a plugin which doesn’t come as standard, you pay for it, if you want more space for photos, you pay for it. The costs can add up based on your needs. For business accounts this can be up to £22 a month and you still have to make every change yourself!

CMS

Maybe a CMS is the right website for me? CMS’s are quite a broad category and essentially, this is a choice you would make if you are looking to organise content. And lots of it. You might also pick a CMS for some of their features.

What is a CMS

A CMS is a content management system. There are a large number of them available and many of them are used in development by web developers. Technically WordPress is a blogging platform although some may argue it can be a CMS as well. Other CMS solutions include Joomla, Moodle and Drupal, all of which have their own merits. If you are looking at a CMS, you will need to take time to decide what is right for you, do you need all or a selection of the features they require or could you get away with a simpler system.

Some corporate solutions might use Microsoft’s Sharepoint site as a CMS solution but usually this would be behind closed doors (intranet system), not open to the public like a regular website. Generally speaking, a CMS is not usually the website solution most people are looking for.

In terms of cost, if you set it all up yourself, the costs are usually pretty low. Drupal for example, if getting developers to build it for you, could potentially cost thousands of pounds. This article on Zesty suggests the average Drupal project would cost 30 to 40 THOUSAND dollars (22 to 30 thousand pounds). This is a considerable jump up from a WordPress project.

Custom built

You may be thinking this is definitely a no go and in some instances you would be right. Why pay for something bespoke when an off the shelf solution is ok for 42% of all websites?

What is a custom built site?

Its no secret that it won’t be exactly the same as another site in terms of design or functionality in most cases but it will usually be to your requirements. The “Do I need a website?” page details the main requirements of any website. These for reference are, an introduction, goals and a way to get in touch.

Lets talk cost

This is one of the mysteries in web development and often people have no idea what to expect, if anything, scared off by the prospect of it being too expensive without ever knowing the real cost.

As an hourly rate, a fee of £65 a hour is fairly standard. This might sound high but lets do some math.

You want a website that does X, Y and Z. You are quoted £1,300. This equates to 20 hours of development time. Now assuming the developer spends 100% of their working time on the project on an 8 hour day, that’s 2 and a half working days.

More often than not, the hourly rate is lower for projects than the maintenance and ad hoc costs for unseen development requirements. In most cases, if you are quoted £1,300 and it takes the developer a week instead of 2 and a half days, you will be getting a bargain.

Lets look at that again.

1 week of development – £1,300
A WordPress site, up to £1,000

Yes it might be cheaper to use the WordPress route, if you only want a “I have a website” type of website. If you are not fussed about changing or updating it, you will be getting a unique site, built for you for almost the same price!

So maybe… it’s entirely possible that a custom built website is the right website for me!