If you have a business or wish to create a personal brand but don’t have a website, it’s probably high time you created one. That’s because a website will help boost your business or brand faster than you can imagine. A website is your channel of communication between you and your clients or customers. It’s also an advertising and marketing platform that’s much cheaper than traditional advertising channels like radio or Television.
But creating a website can be particularly daunting especially for newcomers. Having a website that your customers can visit involves roughly a three-step process;
- Domain booking
- Design and development
- Website Hosting
Your journey to owning a website of your own involves those three stages.
Domain booking
When you start to think about owning a website, it begins with a name. What shall you call it? A domain is your address on the internet. Think of it like a phone number for the web. For instance when we thought of HatariCloud, we needed to book a domain where prospective clients would find us online which as you might have guessed is “hataricloud.com” .
Domains are thankfully very cheap. A dot com domain such as hataricloud.com is priced at Ugx 60,000 per year if you’re buying it from us. You have to renew your domain annually, so this is not a one-time cost.
Design and development
Once you’ve a domain, you’re one-step away from owning a website. The next step is designing and developing your website. This is a very creative process akin to building a house. Every client is unique so there’s no one-size-fits-all kind of website. If you own a restaurant for instance, your website can’t be similar to that one of an accounting firm owner.
The cost of designing a website also vary depending on a number of factors such as content and features. If your website is going to be content-intensive, it’ll cost a lot more. For instance, designing a website for a media company such as a television station or newspaper will require a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can manage editors, sub-editors, authors, contributors, images, videos. It should also be easy to navigate so that readers can find relevant content. This kind of website can’t cost less than Ugx 5,000,000 if you’re to contract Hataricloud.
On the other hand, if you’re website isn’t very content-intensive or won’t have lots of dynamic functionality — something people like to call a “simple website” — then that costs a lot less. Most website design firms can settle for something below the Ugx 1 million mark for such a website.
Website hosting
The final frontier to you having a website is actually hosting it. Hosting means having your website site sit on some giant computers on the internet that are constantly hooked to power and the internet. This isn’t a creative process at all. And thanks to the economies of scale, hosting a website is the second cheapest stage of the three.
Depending on who you choose, hosting costs anything between Ugx 100,000 to Ugx 1,000,000 depending on the complexity and traffic of your website. You can read more on this on “How much it costs to host a website in Uganda“.
“So how much the entire thing cost?”, some of you must be already wondering. To make things simple, let me tabulate a bill of costs of a client X we recently worked on.
| Client | Domain booking | Design and Development | Hosting | Total cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| clientx.com | Ugx 60,000/yr | Ugx 1,200,000 | Ugx 170,000 /yr | Ugx 1,430,000 |
As you can see, it costs on average Ugx 1,500,000 only to get your awesome website and an running. Remember domain and hosting are renewable annually.
Feature Image: actoncreative