Web Development

Today, there is no longer a question of whether someone needs a website. If your business is not on the internet, then you still don’t have a business. And without a personal website, it’s hard to consider anyone well-known, popular, or successful.

However, before ordering the creation of your project or doing it yourself, you still need to answer the main question: why. And based on that, make decisions and choose your path.

Contents
Website Goals
Website Solutions
– Builders
– Content Management System (CMS) Websites
– Custom Projects
How to Choose the Development Approach

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Website Goals

If it’s about a company, the main goal is often to create a quality marketing tool online. One through which sales will happen or clients will be attracted. For non-commercial projects, the goals are practically the same. Websites for politicians, journalists, writers, artists, musicians are also created to build a loyal community, gather allies, fans, and ultimately direct them towards a desired action, such as voting, attending a concert, buying a book, downloading a music video, and so on.

Why is it important to define goals? The thing is, a website can be created from the simplest to incredibly complex, from doing it yourself for free to a project with a huge budget and support costs. But is it worth spending extra? Or is it more reasonable to limit oneself to a level of reasonable sufficiency?

Website Solutions

As of today, there are three approaches to creating websites. Their cost increases, and each approach has its pros and cons.

Builders

The easiest option is to create a project using a website builder. There are quite a few of these systems today, and the number is growing every year. Well-known ones include Tilda, Wix, Shopify, and so on.

The undeniable advantage of such a website is simplicity in development. Just register on the service, read the instructions, and assemble the project from ready-made blocks created by programmers.

The cost of development from scratch, if you manage to do it yourself, is relatively small, or you can pay a freelancer a modest amount. There are plenty of specialists because they don’t require any special knowledge or programming languages and website design skills. The project is built like a child’s wooden block house with pictures.

The question is only that in this world, everyone gets exactly what they pay for. And with this simplified approach, there are drawbacks. The main one is that a builder website will never truly be yours. It’s a service you subscribed to. Therefore, you have to live by someone else’s rules, pay every month as soon as the project reaches a certain level of development, even if they give you a free trial. And you also have to use only what is pre-developed and offered. No room for deviation.

But that’s not the worst part. Perhaps, an even more significant problem with builders is that search engines don’t particularly like them. One can argue, of course, but we’ve never seen such a project in the top search results of Google or any other system.

But then where do you get customers, for whom the project was created in the first place? Solely from paid advertising, for example, buying clicks from search services or transitions from social networks. Yes, it’s a working scheme, but it’s important to understand that it’s quite expensive. The cost of each visitor will be at least approximately one dollar or more, depending on the topic and competition. But a click is not a purchase or an order. Will the profitability of your business cover such expenses?

From our perspective, builder websites are suitable only for one purpose: when you need to create, for example, a single-page landing page to sell a specific temporary product or service in stock. When you need to quickly and cheaply assemble a project in a day. Then advertise it. Quickly sell, serve customers, and forget.

In all other situations, a cheap and quick approach is unlikely to work to such an extent, and it’s worth thinking about something more serious. But even for the simplest single-page websites, we prefer to find a more quality solution. To have the possibility of further development and adding necessary functionality. And for that, it’s better to choose the next option.

Content Management System (CMS) Website

According to some data, up to 70 percent of websites on the World Wide Web are built on one or another Content Management System (CMS). The most popular among them include WordPress, OpenCart, Joomla, Bitrix, and so on. This solution represents a kind of compromise between individuality on one hand and significant simplification of development on the other. When creating a website, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel; the core tasks are already solved. The system is pre-built, and it just needs to be configured to fit one’s needs.

Typically, the design in good content management systems is completely separate from functionality. It’s not even necessary to develop it from scratch; it’s quite possible to buy something professionally made in advance and then customize it to some extent to make the website unique.

Moreover, ready-made systems offer a plethora of pre-built solutions, from property listings to fully functioning online stores with integrated payment systems and more. But beyond that, there’s nothing stopping you from adding your own functionality to the site by hiring professional programmers.

For those who are budget-conscious, it’s worth noting: buying something ready-made is always significantly cheaper than developing something entirely custom. It’s like the difference between taking the metro and a taxi. The hourly rate of a programmer for small businesses always seems high, and for a novice blogger, it’s usually prohibitively expensive. Therefore, existing templates are always in demand.

Indeed, it’s not always necessary to start everything from scratch. Let’s consider a simple example. Right now, you’re reading this article in a browser window. You can customize it however you like, change the content, jump from site to site. But who would think of ordering and developing their own program for internet browsing without a specific need?

If a website is created on a content management system, the production time can range from a few days to a week if no special functionality needs to be added. Consequently, the cost of such work usually amounts to no more than a thousand euros, and in most cases, even less. Again, this depends on additional components.

Maintaining such a website can be done either for free if you learn to do it yourself or very inexpensively. Updates are released by the system developers, so there’s no need to do them; it’s enough to create a system backup and then press a button to let everything happen automatically under your control.

Custom Projects

Unfortunately, content management systems also have their drawbacks. Of course, they offer fewer possibilities than when everything is created from scratch. And if the future site owner has high individual requirements, then the project needs to be developed entirely independently.

It’s important to understand that no single, even the best specialist can perform this work qualitatively alone. At the very least, a designer will be needed to draw the future site in a graphic editor, a coder to turn the image into code, programmers for the backend and frontend, i.e., for the closed internal part of the site and for its external shell, and so on. In general, it’s a task for a team.

Indeed, custom projects can satisfy any, even the strangest, “wants.” But at the same time, the development period stretches to a minimum of 3-4 months, and the cost increases to 10 thousand euros and beyond.

Who needs custom development? In the absolute majority of cases, it’s not required. But it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to create their own AliExpress or Facebook on something ready-made. In mega-projects like these, dozens and hundreds of the world’s best programmers work with corresponding salaries, so it’s easy to imagine the budget size.

In what cases is it most often impossible to find a ready-made solution? When it’s not a company’s website or a store but an entire web service with many sellers and participants. For example, a new marketplace, its own social network, and the like.

Which Development Approach to Choose in the End

For a website, the development option needed is the one that will be sufficient to achieve specific goals. If it’s about a store, real estate agency, hotel, restaurant, or especially a personal blog, an artist’s website, or a music band’s site, it unequivocally makes sense to choose from ready-made Content Management Systems (CMS). Even if some compromises need to be made. At least because the cost of such development is one to ten, just like the timeframes.

A website on a Content Management System is a kind of golden mean between builders, where money is often wasted, and being overly frugal results in paying twice on one side, and the excessively expensive creation of something unique on the other.

We have about two dozen such projects in our portfolio. And yes, it happens not because we can’t create individual special projects. In reality, for any developer or web studio, serious projects are always more profitable and interesting. You can work on them for years, earning first on the creation, and then on maintenance.

But we undertake projects in the interests of our clients. Typically, what everyone needs is not just any website but one that can solve specific tasks for reasonable money. And, at the same time, be profitable and bring in revenue, not become a burden for the business.

Even the most complex project at the start—we would still recommend starting with some ready-made system whenever possible. Because when launching a new direction, there is never extra money. The resources available are always more crucially directed towards finding and attracting new clients, rather than towards beautiful, specially crafted images and additional minor online services.

Professional startups advise launching a project as quickly as possible and developing it, rather than preparing something expensive and unimaginable without knowing whether it will be profitable.

So the choice, from our perspective, is clear: the best option is the golden mean.