Building a website is not a luxury these days. It is not at all necessary to address this task to a specialist, armed with a suitcase of money. Almost anyone, having a PC with the Internet at hand, is able to create it on their own. For 2-4 days. And it will be inexpensive. Approximately as much as it takes for 3-4 average trips to the grocery store. We are talking about paying for everything necessary for the operation of the site for a year in advance.
Most often, the first site of a beginner is a business card or a blog. Less often – an online store, landing page or forum. The first pair are projects that are easy to work with, it is convenient to start with them. For example, an entrepreneur needs to advertise and sell a product or service online. Need a business card. It is made simpler. Here the main part of the work is the content for which the site serves as a frame. In general, a little ordinary and computer literacy, investments and it’s done.
USE OF PROGRAMS TO DEVELOP THE SITE
The most popular and accessible tools for website development for beginners are online designers and CMS. The former, on average, are easier to understand and convenient, the latter are more difficult, but provide more opportunities. You can start at least from one, at least from another camp. The main thing is to choose a platform that will fully satisfy the technical requirements of the task.
WEBSITE DESIGNERS
An extensive family of web services intended primarily for use by beginners. But not only – there are powerful designers that are practically not inferior to high-quality CMS. Some of them are specialized. We are talking mainly about store and landing platforms, although there are engines, for example, for creating a portfolio or just business sites.
Constructors – programs for layout of web pages and content management, which are already installed on the hosting and configured in a competent way. A short registration and template selection are required from the user to get started. Then he gets into the editor and can start setting up all the site parameters.
The most common services that allow you to collect pages in a visual editor: select the desired sections, elements, widgets, drag them to the desired positions, work with settings, design, add content and get the web page of the required purpose. Programming skills are not needed, although it is often possible to insert your own code. This helps in cases where, for example, you need to synchronize the site with some external web service, for which the constructor does not provide the corresponding widget out of the box.
Any constructor contains sets of ready-made templates, which are usually divided into types of sites (landing page, shop, business card, blog, etc.) and topics (IT, construction, tourism, medicine, etc.). Most of the time templates are responsive which is a good thing. Some engines allow you to separately customize the design for different types of devices, mobile and PC.
Many constructors allow you to select modules to work with. It can be a store, a blog, a pop-up or form builder, a photo and video editor, or something else like that. This is done so that the user does not overload the editor area with unused functions and can assemble his own toolbar.
Constructors are good because they are guaranteed to give a result if the engine is chosen correctly. Let’s say we need a shop. You have taken a specialized eCommerce service. You can be sure that it has all the features to create a normal store. Particular attention should be paid to the opportunities for promoting sites – the more convenient and better they are implemented, the easier it will be to get the first customers after the site is launched.
CMS
Most of the websites on the Internet are based on CMS. There are many of them, although the most popular are a dozen and a half. They are paid and with a free license. The latter are more in demand and make up the TOP-3 popularity in the world. Paid ones are distinguished by the presence of official technical support, detailed documentation and a centralized release / update of extensions.
There are profile (forum, store) and universal CMS, allowing you to create almost any type of site with varying degrees of quality. In the basic configuration, the engines, as a rule, are not very well pumped functionally. Extensions (modules, plugins, components, scripts) can significantly enhance the basic capabilities of any system.
In general, selecting, configuring and working with extensions is a mandatory skill when working with any CMS. Also, all in varying degrees of rigidity require programming skills from the user. At a minimum, HTML/CSS is the basics. The languages required for work are presented by the specific engine. Usually we are talking about PHP and JavaScript.
For any CMS, there are a number of plugins and ready-made templates for website design. The more popular it is, the more there are, but the higher the probability of poor quality. For free systems, many make add-ons. Both pros and beginners. There are proven studios, developers. There are doubtful ones. After installing an extension with errors, malicious code, or a version that is incompatible with the engine, the site may crash. Therefore, it is important to create backup copies of the site and databases in time.
Many popular hostings support automatic installation of various CMS. You will need to create a database, buy a domain and specify the installation path to a folder with its name. Not much more difficult than constructors. To understand a specific engine from scratch, watch the lessons on video hosting – the best way to get started effectively. Save a lot of time.
COST OF CREATING A WEBSITE MANUALLY
All builders have tariffs that provide a different number of opportunities (amount of disk space, functions, bonuses) and are designed to create different types of sites, if we are not talking about a highly specialized platform. Usually they offer 2-4 tariffs with different prices, among which the average options are the most balanced. The price is usually $5-10/month. It can be a little cheaper and much more expensive, especially for foreign eCommerce platforms.
Designers usually give discounts from 10 to 50 percent for those who pay for six months, a year or 2 years in advance. Since the site is usually needed for at least a year, it makes sense to save money in this way. Promotions, promo codes are additional options for reducing the cost, but they are not found everywhere. Some services give a domain as a gift when paying for a year in advance. By itself, it costs about $10 or more, depending on the selected zone (.ru, .com, .rf, etc.). On average, a business card website or a blog on a designer costs $80-100/year, and a store is $20-30 more expensive.
The minimum investment for a website on CMS is payment for hosting and domain. Paid templates, plugins, specialist services can increase the estimate dozens of times – depending on who, how much and what you buy for the site.
The price of hosting is different, they also have service packages with different conditions – disk size, power, functions, etc. Good shared hosting costs $5-10/month. Promotions, a gift domain and other bonuses are also possible here – it depends on the chosen platform. In general, we are talking about the amount of $ 80-150 / month, but the chosen CMS due to paid extensions can significantly increase these figures. Yes, and in itself can be paid. Everything has to be considered individually.
If you need to create one site, then on the designer, most likely, it will be possible to do this a little cheaper. If there are many, then the advantage is on the CMS side. The fact is that some popular hostings give 20 or 50 GB of storage without restrictions on the number of sites and databases. That is, dozens of sites can be placed on one hosting plan, although domains will have to be purchased for each of them separately.
You can also order a website from a web studio. Their prices range from 3-5k UAH. for a template business card and up to hundreds of thousands and more than a million UAH. for something like a network online store. There is no standard. The price depends on the fame and appetite of the studio, the complexity of the project and the package of services that you buy from it.
CONCLUSIONS
Self-creation of a site in a constructor or on a CMS saves a beginner money for the development and maintenance of the project. Ordering a turnkey site is a time saver, but this statement is ambiguous. If the project is complex, then you will have to contact a specialist every time, explain the task, and pay for the work. It is good if the specialist easily communicates, is responsible and works quickly. If not, then the solution of the issue will be delayed, you can lose money on this – a new batch of goods was not added on time, conditions, prices, etc. were not changed. If the budget is modest and there is free time, then the site should be done independently. The cost of sites that do not require anything special in terms of design and functionality is comparable to that of designers and CMS. The engine cannot be chosen at random: look at the reviews, read the ratings, reviews.
If money is not a problem, and the site is planned to be complex, then it is easier to contact a web studio. Consider your resources and project specifics. Constructors are more convenient, CMS is more promising as a class for a website developer. Everyone decides for himself what to use.