Spending too much money on your website?
Jul14Written by:
2009/07/14 09:26 AM 
How much money are you spending on your website? You probably find it is too much. Many web developers charge the earth for website development. Having an expensive website is not in and of itself a bad thing, as long as it delivers on your expectations and company goals.
You could pay anywhere from R5000 to R15000 for a five page static website. Sometimes this does not even include the Graphic design, such things as logo’s and banners. This is normally for a static website, ie HTML, no database backend. If you want a custom dynamic database driven website, then you might have to fork out the moola.
Check out our article on Cheap Websites
Then there is the issue of update and maintenance. Maintenance over the long run is probably the most expensive part of any website. For websites to be effective, they have to be updated regularly, they have to have fresh content. Most small companies, and to a certain degree large companies, do not have dedicated web developers at their disposal. So updating and maintaining their website becomes a big burden forcing them to hire someone to do it. Normally this would be the initial developer. He comes at a cost, between R200 – R600 per hour, depending on his skills and popularity.
This does not include website hosting. With the current broad band fiasco in South Africa, web hosting is an expensive exercise. You can get cheap hosting, but then you get what you pay for. Most hosts would charge a price per month that has limitations on it. Limited web pages, limited disk space, and most importantly limited website bandwidth.
Content Management Systems
Enter in the CMS, Content Management System. A content management system in essence is a self maintained website. CMS’s normally run as a dynamic database driven website. The user Interface is similar to any word processor when it comes to maintenance. Most CMS’s are skinnable, meaning that you design the look and feel of your site once, then apply that to all the pages. No need to do redo the whole page every time you want to add a page to your site.
Traditionally Content Management Systems come in at a fraction of the price. The CMS is normally a fully developed system. The website development costs are cut down significantly. The Maintenance costs are also cut down. If you take advantage of the self maintenance of the CMS, then the cost of a web developer is taken right out of the picture. It will do you and your company a great service if you investigate and do research on converting your site to a website designed on a Content Management System framework.
The top three opensource Content Management Systems are:
Check out the OpenSourceCMS Awards 2008
We use Dotnetnuke as our CMS framework. Our website and Blog are all developed within the DNN framework. All our clients websites are developed with DNN.
Cartoon credit: www.sitepronews.com
Related Reading:
Cheap Websites
Dotnetnuke
Content Management Systems
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