5 factors why you need to develop website from the scratch
Progress does not stand still. Online technology is developing so quickly that today nobody will be surprised by the thesis: any, even the smallest business needs a website. A business card with no website just seems strange. These days, more and more clients have started looking for suppliers of goods and services available directly from the supplier online. Sooner or later every business person realizes that it's time to start a website.
Starting to understand the problem, they discover that in addition to making turnkey websites, business owners also have the opportunity to rent already complete sites. As these services become more and more attractive to business owners, a major question arises: Should I order a turnkey website, or should I rent an already complete one? Today, we’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these two options.
1. The Price of Website Rent and Development of the Turnkey Website
When you read advertisements about the ability to lease a website, you might think that it’s not all that expensive, at least if compared with the amounts required by companies that create turnkey websites. However, if you dig deeper into the matter, you find that savings are an illusion. In reality, everything depends on the period during which you are planning to use the site. If the site is needed, for example, to promote a festival that will take place in a couple of months and will not recur, the rent is an optimal decision.
However, if we are talking about a stable business, and the website will be used for years, you will save a good amount of money by opting for the development of a turnkey website. The reason is that in this case you pay only once, receiving the resource in full use, and you won’t be burdened with monthly payments (of course, except for the cost of hosting), which, in addition to elementary discomfort, turn to be quite costly. If you calculate the cost of using the website throughout the year, and even more for several years, it’s easy to see that a one-time cost is generally the better option.
2. The Quality of the Leased Website and the Independently Developed Website
Some resources that offer their clients the ability to rent a website also provide an opportunity to creating a website for free considering you abide by their terms. Naturally, in most cases they are talking about the most primitive business-card website, with poor template and very little to offer by way of graphics and functionality. In fact, this option is suitable only for those clients who don’t necessarily need a functional website, but a reference type website that only offers content. It’s no secret that the quality of a website’s design will either attract or repel potential customers. Even if you prefer the plainest website, you should always remember that the quality of your website design matters.
By choosing a ready-made website on lease, you are actually limiting yourself to the framework used within the templates offered. In these cases, the design of your website will be relatively standard and functions will be limited. Also, if you’d like to add functionality or something unique to the design, you will be asked to pay quite a bit of money to make it happen. However, if you decide to have a turnkey website developed, you won’t have these types of issues. Instead, the developer will ask what functions you’d like included in your website and help you to create a unique design that’s not only appealing to your visitors, but perfectly functional with regard to your business’ needs.
3. Technical Support of a Website
A very important aspect that should be considered is the technical support of your site. Often times, when business owners choose to lease a website for a “small monthly payment”, technical support is incredibly sub-par. When the website owner realizes that the site isn’t working properly, they’ll generally contact technical support. Because this support generally takes a long time, while waiting for support, business owners will search support documents looking for a resource that will help them try to fix the site themselves. Unfortunately, the entire process is incredibly slow and doesn’t always end in desired results. Aside from the amount of time you’ll have to spend fixing problems, chances are you’ll be required to pay extra fees for help from “specialists”.
However, if you choose to have a turnkey website developed, the agreement with the developer generally includes guarantees that if any problems occur in the future, experts will help you with the process of restoring the work relatively quickly. This is incredibly important to remember if your website will require frequent content updates or additions. As a matter of fact, your developer will design your website so that it’s easy to update content, pictures and other information within your website; while constant support will help solve any problems you may come across.
4. Website Search Engine Optimization and Money Saving
Another aspect to consider when starting a website is SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization. The visibility of a website in search engines is one of the most important factors with regard to the profitability of the site. To make your website popular among the hundreds and thousands of competitors’ sites’, you must follow a complex strategy that’s designed to attract targeted visitors from search engines and advertising websites. Search engine optimization requires a comprehensive consideration: consultation with experts, selection and formulation of search queries, optimizing of the site pages and its software features, and more to ensure that the website complies with the terms of search engines. This requires a comprehensive audit of the site and implies some financial costs.
If you decide to lease a website, and it proves to be effective in increasing your income, sooner or later you will face the need to create a more advanced, up to date turnkey resource. In this case, the whole process of site promotion will have to be restarted. If you don’t think about site quality with regard to marketing from the very beginning, you’ll most likely have to spend quite a bit of time and money when it comes time to make revisions to your website’s design. Also, if you’re forced to change your domain name when it’s time to create a new website design, chances are that you’ll lose a large number of clients that are known for returning to your website over and over again.
Knowing that their domain names become their online brands, many business owners face a tough choice; either continue using a poorly functioning website with a poor design and pay a monthly fee to do so, or take a chance on losing clients through a domain name change.
5. Ownership of the Website and Content
An important nuance, which should be considered, is that the lessee is not the owner of the leased site. This, at first glance, obvious fact implies some not so obvious consequences. Firstly, the holder of the domain name is the lessor, thus the domain cannot coincide with the brand name of the client (except accidental coincidence).
Another important factor to consider is that the lessee is deprived of the opportunity to subcontract site optimization to other specialists. Also, the rights to the content posted on the leased resource, also belong to the lessor. This hides many obstacles, especially if we’re talking about website with valuable intellectual property. For example, a website with a portfolio of a photographer or writer could mean that that writer or photographer’s work could become property owned by the website lessor.
Finally, if the customer decides to buy the previously leased site from the agency, the landlord with exclusive property rights may name any price that he or she finds appropriate. The customer will be faced with a choice: either the customer will need to buy the sub-par website at whatever price the lessor decides to charge, or they will have to start from the beginning, building a new website that meets their needs. In General, website rentals (as well as any other rental) create a dependence of the lessee on the lessor in many aspects. Of course, all these difficulties will be dissipated if the business owner decides to have a turnkey website designed. That’s because with a turnkey website, the business owner will own all rights to the design and intellectual property within the site.
In summary, it’s easy to see that a turnkey website designed specifically to meet the needs of a business is a much better option than a rented website. Aside from the savings the website owner will realize over time by only having to pay once, there are several other benefits to having a website designed to meet your needs. A custom turnkey website will include all functionality needed by the business, dedicated technical support, the ability to edit without paying a specialist, and more. While renting a website may seem like the lowest cost, best option, in all reality, by renting a website business owners are only spending more over time than they have to for less functionality than they should get.