FYI: A part of this article can be considered self-promotion.
Now that I have warned you, I can speak from experience: In a small business, there is no time to manage websites, to design newsletters, or track Google Ads campaigns. In a small business it rarely pays off to hire employees with know-how for these tasks, not least because there is also no one who knows how to manage them. What is a “normal” small business? It is a small company with limited resources where everybody is totally focused on business and day-to-day tasks. This is the reason we decided to create Fuzelift: to help small business grow and win online!
But if so, why is the only question that seems to matter how much a website costs?… It seems to me that it’s the equivalent of wanting to know the price of an airplane when I don’t know how to fly it. My conviction is that most of the time the immediate one seems more desirable than the medium or long term. This is not to say that it is not mandatory for any company today to have a website – of course it is! But more important is to know what to do with it: How you will maintain, disseminate and optimise it.
Free sites
Don’t buy cheap sites … If the price is the main factor, you can choose one of the many alternatives that allow you to create free websites. But be careful: it is not because you have a canvas, paint and brush that a beautiful painting will be created.
More important than any tool is experience and knowledge … and also having time to do it! Still, I think that if you want to set up a website for the group of friends you play with and have no financial interest or any major responsability, the various options for creating free websites will be more than enough.
Order a website or subscribe to a monthly plan?
This is where we go back to the story of having a plane and not knowing how to fly it: Do you know what to do with your website? Do you know how to promote it and how to use other channels to increase the visibility of your website? Can you maintain initial quality and comply with the best practices? These are just some of the (many) questions that are often not asked when starting a new website project. The answers to these questions can be the difference between calling your new website cost or investment.
As a rule, I advise a “normal” SME to hire one of the plans we have available. The main reason why I do this is because I like to see my customers satisfied, and currently having a website is the tip of the iceberg. The remaining services included in our Plans are the main “weapon” that our clients use to achieve the goals for which the website was created. Even if you don’t consider becoming our customer, keep in mind that periodic contact with your customers via email, constant monitoring of your website on search engines or the constant presence on a social network can mean more sales and more customers. If it is already difficult to guarantee that you find time to plan and execute these tasks periodically, it may be more difficult to find internal resources with these capabilities… as they say: digital marketing is part art and part science.
Of course, it may still make sense to only order the website and then do its maintenance internally – and in these cases I am the first to advise you! Do you have someone on your team who can do it? Do you need a website just for an event or for a one-off event? If so it makes perfect sense!
I hope this article can help clarify our position and differentiate our Website Creation plans from a budget for just one website. With our Plans, we are putting at your disposal a team specialised in various digital marketing services and we are providing a proactive service that shares our client’s goals.