Budget Websites – How to Get One for Your Business

For most small businesses starting out there’s often the problem of wanting a professionally designed website but not having the budget to pay for it.

Below are 5 tips on how you can get a website for your business without breaking the bank;

• Customise a WordPress theme

If you have the time and technical expertise, you could try customising a WordPress theme yourself to create a website for your business that you can quickly and easily update when you need to.

Alternatively, there are a number of freelance web designers and companies who specialise in customising WordPress themes and you should get a number of like for like quotes for this work once you’ve drawn up a specification of what you’re looking for.

• Trade services with local businesses

If you plan to offer a product or service that you feel could benefit companies in your local area, then you’ve nothing to lose by trying to trade services with them. For example if you are planning to offer a fixed price accountant service, a web design agency may be happy to design a new website for you in return for a number of free months of your professional expertise.

• Free website templates

The trouble with free website templates is that they’re available to everyone and don’t always look very professional. They also tend to have limited capability when it comes to search engine optimisation. If you’re a very small home based business and have no budget whatsoever then free website templates could be an option for you, otherwise they’re probably best avoided.

• Freelancer bidding sites

Getting freelance web designers to bid for your project can be a good way to keep costs down as opposed to hiring a web design agency with a lot of overheads. There are numerous websites that bring designers and business owners together including getafreelancer.com, peopleperhour.com, elance.com and 99designs.com

• Start out small

It’s easy to get carried away when starting a new business and want an ‘all singing, all dancing’ website straight away. The reality is that many small businesses can get by in the first few months or more with a basic one page website with company information, services and contact details.

Starting out small allows you to add pages to your website as your business grows and the money starts to roll in.

If you liked this article you may also want to read 10 good reasons why your business needs a website

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.