Small budget websites, with high impact

All small business owners or start ups with low budgets need a Web presence, but not everyone afford to hire expensive design companies. Fortunately, it is easier than ever to create a low-budget, high-impact website. You can find the right mix of tools and resources to create an exciting small-business Web presence without breaking the bank.

New Tools

Web design is much less complicated than it seems, especially with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors and software packages that make creating Web pages easy as creating word processing documents. Popular editors such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe GoLive take the complexity out of Web design by using intuitive interfaces and copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop technologies. You don’t need computer programming skills to use these editors.

WYSIWYG editors are good for designing a handful of static pages; they are appropriate for businesses whose websites will be relatively small (10 pages or less). However, some small businesses will need more. If your business carries 15 product lines, or you publish often, you need a content management system to easily create, organize and index your content. Many popular CMS packages – such as WordPress - are free, but you may need to pay a small fee to get your website done and then edit it yourself after it’s complete from your developer. Make sure you have a responsive web design and this should not come at an extra cost as it should be the web standard today.

New Talent

While new tools make Web design easier, they require time and dedication to learn. If you lack the time, you’re better served tapping freelance talent to get the job done. Typically, a Web design freelancer can provide you the following kinds of services:

Graphic design. Many small businesses fall down in Web design because their graphic design schemes are bare. Avoid this pitfall, as the look of your website is what communicates professionalism to your customers. If you lack design skills, work with a designer to come up with a logo, font and other elements that capture your company’s identity. Once designed, these elements can be easily fed into a template so that they appear on every page of your site.
Custom code. WYSIWYG editors and content management systems can’t duplicate some of the more exciting Web 2.0 features available. If you have something special in mind – a way for customers to rate your products online, for example – you’ll need the services of someone who can custom-code in JavaScript or a similar language.
Fortunately, this kind of work comes much cheaper than it once did. Although some Web design professionals charge $15,000 Goldtekstudio.com can give you a responsive website under $2,000.

Some people will look to find freelancers, while they can appear to be cheaper for the design, it might not come with a CMS system which you may also need to pay a fee every time you have to make a change. Also we have had work that was incomplete from customers who initially got the work started by a freelancer to only receive something below standard.

A great design is a clean design and is very easy to navigate around. If you spend a little money on pictures or have great pictures yourself, you can have a website that can be as effective as any other high budget website.

One of the other very important factors is the content and the key selling point you can put in a slideshow on the homepage. Content has always been king, you need to come up with some information on what your product is and go into great detail about it, but keep it as short as possible, using video is a great way of providing information to your customers easy.

The slideshow needs to have some impact words that will let your customers know exactly what you do as soon as they arrive on your website.