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When you own an online business, it is important to have an online presence where customers can easily find you. It helps establish your brand as well as credibility. However, all business owners may not have much knowledge required to build a website and you may not have the time to figure out the requirements. If you get a professional to build it for you, you may have to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for a simple site. You will have to weigh the options of time, cost, maintenance and difficulty while making the decision.
Hiring a Professional
This is an expensive option, but you can save time and get a professional looking site. Moreover, many designers only create the website but do not maintain it. Maintaining it will incur additional costs and you need to wait for it to get updated. You will also have to depend on the designer even for small changes to the site.
Using Templates
Today, small businesses can make use of many easy tools to help them build their website on their own. There are many programs for website building that are specifically aimed at people who don’t have much experience. These are in the form of templates that are predesigned. You can select templates with images suitable for your industry and then customize it. With these drag and drop designing tools, anyone can easily build a simple website. Web savvy businessmen can use open source CMS, such as WordPress, to create business websites.
Affordable Options
One major advantage is that you can create the site within a matter of minutes with such affordable options. You can make changes to the site and using such templates also offers you free or integrated hosting. Using a CMS like WordPress offers you a host of plugins as well as themes to select from, in order to create great websites. You can even modify or transform the appearance without making changes to the content. The programs are affordable and have an intuitive interface, which can be easily used even by non-technical businessmen.
Testing your Site
You can surely save money when you do the work yourself. This is a major motivation. Most of the web designing software also has ways for testing the site before you take it online. You can use these features to check out missing tags or broken links as well as SEO and other designing flaws. You can also generate a site map for submitting your site to search engines with the software. Your site can be up and ready within five minutes for a faster launch. The graphics are professional and modern, as Internet professionals create them. You can then run the website in your own domain or even opt for a new domain through the software.
The Downside
However, the disadvantages of such quick solutions are that there are a limited number of advanced functionalities available. The program may have a limited number of plugins and this will limit your website functionalities.
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Kcmouli is a freelancer blogger who loves to blog about anything tech related, including tips on online business software. For more news on lithography, digital printing – check out some of the other posts and do share this post on web 2.0,
