There are many different flavors of website, and every website developer will swear up and down that their particular flavor of the week will be the best choice, but ultimately it comes down to a few simple choices that you as a business owner must ask yourself.

How much work am I willing to do?

The biggest question you have to answer is how much work you’re willing to do.  It goes without saying that if you nothing about website design, then the work involved would be learning about how a website is made and what you should do with it once you’ve made it.  Do you know how to read and write basic web code(HyperText Markup Language? CSS? Javascript?) If not the learning curve can be a bit daunting, especially if you dont want to end up with a site like this one: http://www.raft.org/ Ultimately, before you decide you’re going to hand code your own website, be sure to anlyse how much time it will take to do versus the opportunity cost of not hiring a developer.

How much am I willing to spend?

Ok, so maybe building it yourself is not the most efficient use of your time, so maybe you’ve decided you’re going to hire a developer.  Developers as it seems are as varied as there are colors in the rainbow.  We each have our specilities, some only have functional programming experience, some only have design experience, and some (like myself *cough*) have both.  Unfortunatley with that variablity means that you will also be quoted just about every price under the sun!  There will be people who will be willing to do a website for you for 500.00 or less.. although I wouldnt recommend that route (not just out of pure self-interest).  Did I mention http://www.raft.org/ ? That’s a great example of what 500.00 buys you these days.

Ok! So we’ve cleared up that cheap is not the way to go… Your website is often the first impression a customer will have of your company.  Even if your product line is inexpensive, do you really want to come off as cheap? Of course not, no company would want that.

The trick is finding the happy median between design excellence (The kind marketing companies charge over $25,000.00 for) and economy (let’s not break the bank). On average, and depending on who you go with you should be spending between 3000 and 15000 on your website (depending on size and features of course) for a professional to do the job, anything less and you run the risk of getting a sub-standard site, more for unneeded buracratic nightmares.

What features does my website need?

Need being the operative word here… say you’re a convience store and you want your customers to have a quick and easy way of getting ahold of you. Does that mean you need to drop 25,000.00 on a full on eCommerce site with all the bells and whistles? I would hope not.  For most small businesses you can get away with a simple static website if your content never changes, or a simple wordpress blog site if you’re going to need to make changes.

Do you want to continue to pay your developer every time you make a change or just do it yourself?

This question almost goes back to the “how much work am I willing to do category” but with a twist… the reason you need to ask yourself this question is to decide on whether or not your website will have a content management system pretty much summing up the point of this article.  How crutial is it to have a CMS? Ulitmately, it’s not.. If you’re an HTML guru, you can make the changes to the site directly in code, or if you have buckets of money and dont mind paying someone else to do it for you, you can go that route as well.  Ultimately though if you’re going to want to maintain good value on your investment, you’re not going to want to have to keep paying someone else, OR spend too much of your own time doing it; this is where content management systems come into play.

For large businesses or governement websites, a full featured content management system makes sense, it allows you to make any number of changes to your site without sacrificing the originality of your brand that you might lose in a WordPress CMS type of solution, whereas a WordPress CMS solution will allow you to add new content (not necessarily template changes**) easily and at a much lower cost than a full CMS system, so again it comes down to time, money, and commitment

–Terrence Ward, BSc (Hons.)