Advantages
Our work
Learn
Connect
Websites have become the lifeblood of every single modern business. It's nearly impossible for a business to survive, let alone thrive, without a high-quality website. From drawing in new customers to providing them with your location, a website is meant to provide your potential customers with all the information they need in a streamlined manner.
As you may know, web design does not come cheap! So, what are the considerations to make when trying to get a cheap website designed for your business? Where can you cut corners, where can you not? What should it cost? Should you be able to edit it yourself? Does it have to look and feel professional? Is there such a thing as cheap website design? Keep reading to find out!
The basics of web designs
Modern websites are expensive. But, websites don’t have to cost the earth to be successful and valuable tools for your business. They do, however, need to tick some boxes, and this requires some thought and planning.
If you hire someone to do this for you, they are going to ask for a few bucks. After this article, you should know what to look out for and feel comfortable when deciding how much you are going to invest into your website, knowing full well what you require to generate business from it.
Websites aren't just about looking pretty and appealing to customers who visit them. There's a lot more to consider in terms of the functionality of your website, which is much more important to internet users these days!
Then there's the content. Gone are the days of listing all your products on your website, especially if you're looking for a website to be designed on the cheap. You see, for each product page, developers are going to charge you an extra fee. And, in reality, most of these pages are never even visited. Only a handful of pages on a website get traffic, and these tend to be the products that generate the major revenue for the company. Remember the 80/20 rule? Well, the same applies here.
In our opinion you should be considering five main factors:
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Content
- Search Engine Optimization
- Mobile compatibility
- Look and Feel
We’ll briefly go into each of these four factors and explain why they are important components of your new cheap website design, and how they'll make your website successful at getting visitors and generating enquiries.
1. Content Management System (CMS)
Being able to edit and add pages to your website without the need to request a web developer to get involved is crucial. This is one of the cornerstones of your getting a cheap website design that stays cheap throughout its entire lifetime.
A good content management system will allow you to do this with ease. Our favourite CMS is WordPress because it's so intuitive and easy to learn. WordPress is used by millions of websites all around the world, and this shows just how powerful the system is. Every website can be customised and made to look unique despite using the exact same CMS.
With a quick login and a click on the page you want to edit, you can change text and add or delete images. Adding blog posts and making changes to your website is incredibly easy to do, which negates the need for an expensive web developer to stay on board and be on standby at all times.
There are other CMS platforms available, like Joomla, Drupal, and a bunch of other ones with fancy names, but overall, WordPress is the one CMS that is easily accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be an IT genius to get around WordPress, and YouTube is full of tutorials on how to do just about anything with this popular CMS.
Summary: WordPress is the No.1 choice when it comes to cheap website design.
2. Content
As mentioned earlier that listing all your products is not necessarily a good thing. Potential clients don’t want to run through hundreds of different products. The majority of internet users don't visit all of these websites. It's similar to the extra pages on a Google Search — according to Chitika Insights, 91.5% of Google traffic stays on the first page. Only 4.8% of users click through to the second page of their search results. Now, this might be different to your website's product page, but the concept remains the same. There's a dramatic decline in the number of users that scroll through your product pages.
Based on our own experience and hundreds of product pages are never visited, but a ‘specials’ page will always draw in tons of traffic from users who visit your site. In addition, blog pages that talk about new trends in the industry and how your business is keeping up with them also do well.
Your website needs to outline to a potential client why they should give you a call or drop you an email to further an enquiry into your products or services. Streamlining your website and making it easier to use and faster to read through is always a better option than cluttering it.
A good way to use content to your advantage is to write articles on how your services will help your potential customers excel in their own business. And, if you have a great CMS, you can do this on a monthly and even weekly basis. Would you still be reading this article if this was a page listing the features of our ‘Cheap Website Package’? We doubt it…
Summary: To get a cheap website design that drives enquiries, limit the content, and focus it on benefits rather than pages and lists of features.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
Without search engine optimisation, your cheap website is going to be just that – cheap. With search engine optimisation your cheap website is going to pay for itself thousands of times over. Websites that are focused on SEO and ranking as high as possible on Google yield millions of Rands in business over the years.
The same way that this page is optimised for ‘cheap website design’, the pages on your website should be optimised to display solutions to your potential clients' problems and focus on those solutions. Using WordPress, we make sure that when we hand over a website to a client all the technical SEO elements are taken care of.
All you have to do is write short articles around your clients’ problems and how you solve them. This is the stuff you do all day long when selling your company, so writing information about it can be done with ease. And really, all you need to do is write an article once a month. That’s only 12 times a year! As long as you are consistently producing content, and your website is focused on SEO, you will drive organic traffic to your site.
Our software inside WordPress will make sure all the correct search engine optimisation processes are automatically completed, and crucially, that your new article/page is submitted to Google and other search engines automatically as soon as you publish it.
Summary: The key to cheap website design and SEO is to get the developers to automate it.
4. Mobile compatibility
Over the past few years, the world has changed dramatically. Internet users no longer use their laptops to browse the internet. According to Statista, more than 92% of global users access the internet through a smartphone.
If you think about it, you've likely got your smartphone on you, or near you at any given time. If you need to Google something or visit a company's website, you're most likely going to use your phone rather than a laptop. That's why having a mobile compatible website is crucial.
If someone tries to visit your website from their smartphone or tablet and it's impossible for them to navigate through it, they're just going to head back to their Google search results and find a different website. It's highly unlikely for users to return to a website if they've had a bad experience in the past.
Summary: Having a website that is compatible on mobile devices is crucial to keeping users on your site for longer, and to keep them coming back in the future.
5. Look and Feel
Now, this is important because when a potential client arrives on your website you need to project a professional image. If your website looks like a school project the potential client is going to go back to Google to find another website to solve their problem.
Even a cheap website can look great and impress. Our website, for instance, has a fancy home page, with some unique graphic design work, but the rest of the website is stock standard. The rest of the website is always clean and professional looking, but the focus is on great and valuable content.
The first impression that the user gets is important. Making the home page intuitive and unique will leave a good lasting impression, but it also doesn't take away from the functionality and the ease of navigation that you need from the rest of the site.
Summary: A successful cheap website design needs a great-looking home page, as well as clean and well laid out supporting pages.
At MO Agency we design and implement cheap website designs that work well for our clients. We will tailor our packages to your needs and requirements as well as your budget. Make sure to get in contact with us so we can help you to develop a successful cheap website that drives enquiries and leads for your business.
