The costs of building a website vary greatly, but there are three basic features that you need to be aware of before choosing a free website builder.


First the bad news. There is no correct answer to the question ‘How much does it cost to build a website?’, simply because there is not one kind of website. It’s like asking ‘How much does it cost to buy a car?’ You could be talking about a Ferrari or about a Toyota or anything in between.


The same goes for a website. Are you building the next Amazon, or promoting your dad’s weekend tree-trimming service? Every company has very different needs and very different budgets.

 


But there are good lessons to be learned from asking these questions when you’re planning to build your next website.

What Are The Fundamentals That You Need?


Every website, big or small, has three elements that you will need.

 

  • Every website requires a domain or URL that people will use to access your website.
  • You will need somewhere to host your website.
  • You will need some sort of website builder to create your site.


Let’s unpack these three elements a little further.

 

 

Domain Name


This is your personal address on the internet, the unique name that sets you apart from every other website. When you register a domain, you normally pay a domain name registrar for the right to use that name for a year. If you renew after a year, you keep the name, but if you let it lapse, then someone else can purchase the domain name for themselves.

That’s a fixed cost you won’t be able to avoid. While costs vary slightly, you should expect to pay around $15 per year for your domain name.


Here’s a list of the top domain registrars that we recommend using.

Web Hosting


Hosting on the web is referring to the place where all the content of your website is actually kept. Anyone who accesses your website is actually accessing a particular set of files on the host’s server. Hosting often refers to the company who you are paying to host your files, and they are required to make your website available to anyone searching for it twenty-four hours a day.

Once again, hosting costs vary slightly, but you shouldn’t be paying more than $10 per month just for hosting your new website. That said, some website builders will include hosting in your monthly fee.

Website Builders

 


The act of building your new website is where you will spend the most time and energy as you get started. This is also the one area where there are huge discrepancies in cost. You could use a free website builder that lets you use custom templates to suit your needs, or you could go all the way up to hiring a major web development team to build you a brand new custom website from scratch.


Web building services like Folio Websites offer a number of clean, sophisticated designs that you can customize as well as vital tools such as custom HTML, payment forms, blogging, SEO tools, paid galleries, and more. The best part, your hosting fee and twenty-four hour support are included in your monthly fee.


Take a look at some of the striking designs created with Folio to get a sense of how much you can do with a simple website builder.

 


In today’s business environment, it’s critical to have a website that reflects who you are. You’ll have to pay for the domain name and the monthly hosting but apart from that, you get to decide how much you need to spend and what functionality your site needs to have. If you’re planning on building an e-commerce website or need more sophisticated tools, it might make sense to hire a team of professionals. But if your site is purely to give people information about who you are and what you provide, then you should make use of a website builder that will give you simple, easy to use tools that allow you to build a website of your own.


To start building your own website, get in touch with Folio Websites today.