Website Design & Development

Answer:

Good website design includes basic industry best practices. Mobile responsive design, code that facilitates fast page load times, accessible contrast and design, clear navigation, UX/UI that makes it easy for the user, appropriate whitespace, and more.

Answer:

The cost of a custom website can vary from $1500 to well over $100,000 for enterprise companies. The final cost depends on a lot of factors including:

• • How many pages need to be built
  • Functionality
  • Integrations into third party applications
  • Custom API integrations
  • Brochure site vs e-commerce site
  • Server environment requirements (PCI, etc)
  • any many others!

Most websites for small businesses can be built for under $10,000. Yes, you can get a “friend of a friend” or even a new freelance website designer to build you a site for maybe even under $1000. Yet, it’s not uncommon that those sites are not built with SEO in mind, much less optimization or industry best practices in place.

Answer:

Monthly costs vary depending on your hosting provider and type of account. Most small websites start on “shared hosting”. This means that the hosting provider (Hostgator, Godaddy, Bluehost, SiteGround), puts more than one website on a server box. The more websites they are able to put on one server box, the cheaper it becomes for them and the more money they make. Conversely, the more sites that share a server, the slower performance (page load speeds) each website will experience.

Other options include VPS (Virtual Private Servers), and Dedicated Servers. Each host will provide different configurations and details for each offering. But these options are much more expensive than shared hosting.

Some hosts offer managed options, which take care of updates and other maintenance issues.

Answer:

How long it takes to build a custom website depends on many factors:

• • how many pages are being built
  • functionality requirements
  • third party integrations,
  • and more…

One of the most common things that increases the time it takes to build a website, is the copy (words), logos, and graphic elements that the customer may provide. If a web designer has all of the elements of the website needed to build the website, many websites can be built within 3-6 weeks.

Answer:

Yes & no – depending on your service provider. No matter where you have your website hosted, there is a monthly service fee. Most hosting providers do have an option to pay annually if you do not wish to pay monthly. But even then, those annual fees do cover the monthly fees for the term.

Most regular prices for shared hosting fall between $9-$15 a month. If you subscribe to a service like Wix or SquareSpace, then the fees tend to be higher for comparable functionality. But what to be aware of with some of these services is that the content you put on those hosts, cannot be transferred to your own server some day. At the very least, not all of your content can transfer. So if you ever need a custom site or additional functionality that they don’t provide, you’ll have to start over! Check with the service provider to confirm what content will export, and what won’t export.

Additionally, the SEO for these sites tends to be more difficult to do well. Some of these managed services don’t allow you to even access the code!

Answer:

In our professional opinion, yes, WordPress is better than Wix, SquareSpace, or other managed all-in-one services like those.

WordPress SEO is better. WordPress CMS is easier to use (in our opinion). WordPress is less expensive. WordPress is more flexible. Yes, WordPress is better than Wix.

Answer:

Domain names cost usually around $10-$15 dollars per year. Special domain names like .tech, .store, etc can cost considerably more. Also, some domain names are already registered, and would need to be purchased. Some of these domain names can be hundreds, or even tens of thousands of dollars.

Choose your domain name carefully!

Answer:

Mobile responsive sites change their appearance based on the device or screen that is viewing the site. For example, viewing our site on desktop would give you this view:

But viewing our site on an iPhone XR gives you this view:

Making sure that your website is mobile responsive is extremely important today. More than 50% of all searches take place on a mobile device. So if your website is not mobile responsive, most people will not see your website properly. It will be shrunk down to fit the screen size, making it virtually impossible to use, and giving a horrible user experience.

This is why Google gives preference to mobile sites in its search rankings. So if your website isn’t mobile responsive, then you’ll also make it harder to rank in Google search rankings.