At Design Web, we pride ourselves on our ability to provide the most affordable websites in Louisville. That doesn’t however mean the same thing as the cheapest websites in Louisville. What is the difference between a cheap website and an affordable one?
A cheap website is just that – cheap – made from cheap materials with only the most basic functions. You might ask what do you mean by cheap materials? Aren’t websites just a little bit of information online? Well, the short answer is that they are and they aren’t. While your site may be just a few files, it depends on a variety of support items to exist. Hosting for example; hosting is where your website lives. Think of hosting like a storefront you lease for your website, just like a business storefront. Different hosts have different service options. Some hosts offer shared space, which can reduce your cost, but comes at a price. Shared hosting is fine if you have a few good neighbors, but cheap webdesign services tend to overcrowd their hosting with any site that comes along. What does that mean for you? Unfortunately, that means your visitors will get turned away more often.
Another aspect of cheap web development is speed. All it takes to lose sales and valuable clients is 3 seconds. Studies show that if your site doesn’t come up in 3 seconds, you can lose up to 70% of your visitors. Even the most loyal customer will move on to another site or service if they think your site takes forever to load. Why is overcrowded hosting bad? Much like an overcrowded apartment building, an overcrowded hosting provider means you will always be competing for resources, resources like bandwidth. Bandwidth is a lot like parking spaces and road frontage for your business. You only have so much bandwidth to serve your customers before service starts slowing down and space is filled up and people start getting turned away. With overcrowded hosting, you also run the risk of being taken down by any negative site that shares your network/IP neighborhood. Like having a fire in an apartment, the entire building has to be evacuated until the issue is solved. If one site on your shared host gets taken down or attacked, all sites on that server could potentially be taken down. It could be down for a few minutes, or it could be down for days. Once your site goes down there is nothing to do but wait.
Another aspect of cheap websites is what type of underlying CMS or coding that is used. Most businesses do very well working on a Drupal or WordPress website, which are fairly easy to maintain and set up. Cheap websites are typically set up on a Squarespace, Weebly, or Wix platform, which is not beneficial to the client. These websites are poor for SEO, or search engine optimization. This means that you will rank much lower than a similar site built on a professional CMS platform if you go with a drag-and-drop website generator. These sites also charge monthly for their services, sometimes meaning that you pay more over time than you would if you went with a one-time payment for a professional, affordable website. Lastly, these websites never give you ownership of the site. If your third-party site generator suddenly goes bankrupt, you will lose your website. If you decide to move over to another hosting company, you also lose your website as it is non-transferable.
There is a lot to be risked in going with cheap over affordable. At Design Web, we pride ourselves as having the most affordable websites in Louisville. We never cheap out, and the websites that we create are just as good as the big name agencies. We have professional web developers who can match, function-for-function or design-for-design, any website created by the big name agencies, at half the cost. The difference is our low overhead. We don’t have huge art pieces in our lobby, or top-shelf liquor bars in our office. Sorry, that also means no pool tables. What we do offer are the best websites in town at a fraction of the cost. Come find out more about our amazing websites and get a quote today!
