How to Know When to Spend Money On a Website
There are several aspects to having your own website and you don’t need every piece at the same time. Depending on where you are in the process of developing your business idea and brand identity, you can spread out your costs over time until it’s necessary to spend. Below, we outline the 3 parts of setting up a website, how much they cost, and when to invest in each. They should be completed in order.
- Domain Registration
This is the process of reserving your domain name which serves as your website address. It generally costs about $10 a year and must be renewed for you to retain ownership of the domain. As soon as you settle on a name, it’s time to claim it. Learn more about domain registration here. (You can use code DOMAIN10 at domain.com to get 10% of your name registration) - Website Hosting
This is the leasing of server space to house the data for your website. It typically averages $7 to $40 a month depending on the server and features you’re getting. Before you pay for hosting (assuming you’ve already reserved the domain name), make sure you have a completed brand kit, vision, mission, and positioning statements, coherent brand story, purpose-model canvas, and communication plan (check out our Discord library for free resources to prepare any of these building blocks). This will give you a blueprint to quickly put together your website pages and make it coherent and representative of you. Read more about web hosting here. - Website Builder
After completing steps 1 and 2, you essentially have an address and an empty lot of land. You now need to build the walls of your business and furnish them. If you’ve properly prepared the pre-build documents, you will have a blueprint to expedite your website build. There are lots of drag-and-drop website builders out there. Many hosting companies have their own website builder, most people have heard of Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress, and self-hosted WordPress websites have page builder plugins to make creating beautiful custom pages easy. These can cost anywhere from $20 to $50 a month depending on whether you need an eCommerce store. dp digital’s self-hosted WordPress sites include an eCommerce store with an easy drag-and-drop builder and has no traffic or data limit. Get Web Monetized Web Hosting from dp digital
