Having a website is an important part of going online. A website makes your business visible to the growing number of consumers online. In case the article on the 5 benefits of a business website is not enough for you, here are more reasons why you need to build a website for your business.

1. Increase sales

A website will enable you provide information about your products and services online. Consumers are increasingly searching online for information about products and services they are interested in buying.

A website will make your business accessible to these high value consumers who are educated and responsible for making buying decisions.

With a website your business is no longer limited to its brick and mortar locations. This gives your business more visibility with the resultant increase in sales.

A website enables you use techniques like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Email Marketing (EM), and Social Media Marketing (SMM) to target consumers who are more likely to be interested in your products and services increasing conversion rate and boosting sales.

With SEO, SEM, and SMM you can drive targeted traffic to your website. Combine these with good landing pages and the only direction sales will be going is up. There are also other opportunities offered by the internet to increase sales, but you will never actualise their full potential if you do not have a website.

With a website you can also use emerging and fast growing marketing techniques like Affiliate Marketing and Influencer Marketing to get other people to recommend your products and services online.

These influencers and affiliate marketers can easily recommend your product page or service page driving their fans and followers to it. These could result in massive sale if you play it right.

Even when an influencer does not share your website link, and simply recommends your product by name, having a website means interested fans can easily learn more about the product or service.

2. Promote your office & contact

A business website will enable you populate the web with your office addresses and other channels through which customers can reach you.

Consumers who have heard of your business from a friend or from your offline campaigns may want to reach you. Can they? If they cannot reach you, they will most definitely reach your competitor who has made the smart investment on a website.

3. Your Competitors are Already Online

This one is meant to scare you. And you should be scared if your competitors have websites and you don’t. Your competitors are already taking advantage of the huge opportunities that being online provides to grow their businesses and you are still doing what your forefathers did: waiting in your office for customers to come.

You may be wondering why customers are walking past your office location and heading straight to your competitors. You may even be planning to go and get some black magic to boost your business. You don’t need black magic, what you need is a website with targeted online campaigns and you could be smiling like your competitors.

Even if your competitors do not have business websites yet, they may be considering one. You need to be a trend setter in your industry, so you should start drawing up your going online plan and a website should be somewhere in there.

4. Become More Customer Friendly

A website makes your business more customer friendly. Customers deserve to know what is going on in your business like new products, price changes, new offices, changes in contact phone number and email, etc and your website is a good platform to inform and educate customers.

Without a website, customers can’t get up to date information about your business. Imagine a customer not being able to reach you through an old phone number you left in an old ad campaign in a newspaper.

That is very wicked of you. The customer is king and should not be toyed with. Build a business website, ‘jor’ and update it regularly too.

5. Take Advantage of Free viral Marketing

Word of mouth sells. People are more likely to buy stuff if recommended by a friend. Although word of mouth, sales can also occur offline, the internet creates the possibility of speedy viral marketing.

An interesting news about your business or a product you just launched can go viral on social media sites.

Your business website makes it easier for people to spread information about your business. They can easily share links from your website with their friends and their friends with their friends and so on on BBM, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. And you do not have to pay for it they are doing it because it is interesting to them.

6. Save Cost

A website also has a cost-saving benefit. It saves cost on marketing since you can now target consumers more accurately online and benefit from viral marketing from social media. A website also reduces the cost of educating and informing customers.

You no longer need to spend so much on printed materials as some of your customers can access information from your website. Just update your website and it is accessible to all.

Credit: Paschal Okafor

The post The 6 Major Reasons to Build a Website for your Business appeared first on Macvertech.

Before building a website for your business, it is important to know the costs involved. This will ensure you budget adequately for the project. Some business owners think building a website is a one-off thing. You just build it and you go to sleep. However, there are fixed costs and recurrent costs involved in building a business website.

So, here are a few items to add to your budget. However, it is important to note that the cost of building a website depends on the complexity of its implementation. For example, a simple 5-page business website will usually cost much less to build compared to web applications like eCommerce websites, social network sites, or betting websites.

This means that there is no fixed cost for building a website. The cost of building websites varies widely. One may cost 100,000 Naira ($280) to build while another could cost up to $1 billion.

The purpose of this article is to show you the different cost components so that you will be more informed when talking with a web designer or when researching further in case you decide to do the web design yourself.

Now, here are some of the cost components you need to be aware of:

1. Cost of Web Hosting & Domain Name

A website needs to be hosted on a server connected to the internet. You need to pay a web hosting service to house your website on the web.

You can also buy your own server and run things in-house, however, this is very expensive and only recommended when absolutely necessary.

For most people securing the services of a web hosting company is the only way to go as it is more cost effective. Payment is billed monthly but you can also pay every six months or annually.

Cost of good quality web hosting can cost from as little as $10 (3,800 Naira) per month for shared hosting to over $1,000 (380,000 Naira) per month for dedicated server hosting. You will pay a lot more upfront if you choose to host the website yourself.

There are many hosting companies with varying degrees of customer satisfaction. Here are some of the companies that offer Best Web Hosting.

Web hosting is a recurrent cost. Your web designer may incorporate the hosting cost for the first year in the initial cost of designing the website. So, you have to budget for hosting every year.

What you pay for a website depends on the resource requirement of the website like number of expected visitors, CPU usage, RAM requirement, etc. For example, hosting this blog costs around $503 per year (about ₦191,000) including cost of CDN. In case you are interested, here is my host.

Types of Web Hosting

Now I will be breaking down the different hosting types, recommended usage, and price range.

Shared Web Hosting

Cost: $10 to $20 (monthly)

This is the most cost effective hosting plan available. Like the name implies your website shares a server with numerous other websites. If you are planning a small business website or a blog, this is usually where to start.

If you are planning a web application like eCommerce websites, this type of hosting is not advisable. All the best hosting companies offer shared hosting. You can checkout GoDaddy hosting, click here.

Pros: Cost Effective, Easy to Setup,

Cons: Limited Server Resources, Limited access to Server Configuration, Restricted to Pre-implemented technologies, lacks Flexibility

Cloud Hosting

Cost: $10 to $1000 or even more (monthly)

Cloud hosting is a modern type of hosting that combines the cost effectiveness of shared hosting with the flexibility and reliability of VPS hosting. This is the recommended route if you are building a website in 2020.

Though like shared hosting multiple websites can run on one server in cloud hosting, though in practice the websites run on multiple servers (server cluster). Each website runs on a virtual server with its own resources allocated to it.

For example, with shared hosting a boost in the traffic of one customer will negatively impact other customers who have their websites installed on the same server.

However, with cloud hosting each customer gets a virtual software server where their websites run with resources like CPU and RAM allocated.

This means that even if a customer uses more than their fair share of server resources, other customers are guaranteed their allocated server resources.

In addition, because cloud hosting runs on multiple servers, there is redundancy leading to more reliability. Here are some providers of the Best Cloud Hosting.

You can Checkout Liquid Web, they are one of the best providers of Cloud hosting.

Pros: Cost Effective, Easy to Setup, Reliable, Fast, Scalable

Cons: Limited Server Resources, Limited access to Server Configuration, Restricted to Pre-implemented technologies

Managed WordPress Hosting

Cost: $10 to $400 (monthly)

WordPress is the most popular platform for building websites. So, it makes sense that hosting companies now offer hosting services optimized for WordPress. If your website is to be built with WordPress, a managed WordPress hosting will be great.

WordPress Hosting is not really a unique type of hosting it is simply shared hosting or cloud hosting (and sometimes VPS hosting) optimised to run WordPress very efficiently.

VPS Hosting

Cost: $30 to $300 (monthly)

VPS Hosting is the forerunner of cloud hosting. The acronym means Virtual Private Server, which is self-explanatory given my description of cloud hosting above.

Where VPS hosting departs from Cloud hosting is that while Cloud hosting is built for simplicity, VPS is built to be highly configurable.

If you are building a website that requires technology that are not pre-implemented on a cloud hosting platform or requires a lot of resources, VPS Hosting is a good choice.

Pros: Reliable, Scalable, Highly Customisable

Cons: Not for newbies, Comes with some restrictions

Dedicated Server Hosting

Cost: $79 to $1000 (monthly)

Here you get an actual server to yourself. The cost of hosting depends on the configuration of the server. Dedicated Server Hosting is best if your application requires a lot of resources and configuration, but you do not want to burden yourself with the complexity and cost of owning and managing your own server.

Pros: Reliable, Highly Customisable

Cons: Not for newbies

Self Hosting

Cost: from $1,800 / year (can go as high as millions of dollars)

Here you buy, run, secure, and manage your own server. There is no need to do this except you have some proprietary software or sensitive data you do not want people without the right clearance fiddling with or stealing.

This is why a lot of  government departments and agencies as well as  the world largest corporations run their own servers.

SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate enables encrypt your website making it more secure.

SSL is now becoming a norm for most modern websites since Google has started heavily pushing it with its introduction as a ranking factor in Google’s very popular search engine and by labeling non-SSL sites as Not secure in its Chrome browser.

A number of good web hosting companies now offer free SSL certificate for their hosting plans. Some will offer free SSL certificate for the first year, meaning you will start paying from year 2.

Cost of SSL certificate varies from as low as $10 to up to $300.

Domain Name Registration

While thinking about hosting, you also need to be thinking about buying a domain name. You need to register your domain name with a domain name registration service.

A domain name is a unique address (a.k.a web address) of your website on the internet like www.yourbusinessname.com. It is on this web address that your potential customers can reach your business.

You buy a domain name through a domain name registrar. Domain names are billed yearly. Like in hosting, you can buy your domain name from a local or international domain name registrar. Cost starts at around $10 for new domain names.

If you are a Nigerian based business or could some day open shop in Nigeria, it is a good idea to register a .ng domain name. This starts at 2,500 Naira ($7) for .com.ng and 15,000 Naira ($42) for .ng domain names.

In your budget, you need to add cost of at least one year hosting and one year domain name registration. Then every year you need to budget for renewal of your web hosting plan and domain name registration.

Note that you can pay for web hosting and domain registration for more than a year. You can decide to pay for 2, 5, or even 10 years.

If you are designing your website via a web design service, you may be offered free hosting and domain name registration for the first year as part of the web design package.

You will then have to pay the web designer for subsequent years to maintain your hosting.

2. Cost of Content Creation

Before the actual design of the website, you need to think long and hard about why you want to build the website. This will enable you to determine what you want to share with the world.

Do not expect the web designer to tell your story for you. You know your business better than anyone else. So, you should be some how involved in the process.

Though, you know your business well, you may need a professional copywriter to help craft a compelling message. Depending on what you need, you could get a copywriter for as little as $5 per hour to over $1000 per hour.

In Nigeria, you could get a copy written for 500 Naira to 50,000 Naira per page, depending on what you want and the level of skills required.

However, sometimes, when building a website (especially business/company websites), the web designer will incorporate the cost of copywriting in the quote.

Content creation also include the media that will be on the website like the logo, images, animations, and videos. You may need to hire professionals to help you out with some these services or you could rely on your web designer to handle them at a cost.

When you get a quote from your web designer, it is a good idea to find out if content creation is included in the cost and if yes which ones.

However, you need to be involved in the process. You need to supply materials needed for the content creation. There may also be a need to interview you to understand your business. This will enable the copywriter to write a more compelling message.

Here are a summary estimate of cost of content creation

• Copywriting – $5 to $1000 (per page)
• Logo Design – $5 to $150
• Marketing Video – $5 to $500
• Animation Videos – $10 to $5000

3. Cost of the Web Design Work

If you are using a web designer, you should have to budget for the cost of the web design service. If you do not have a logo already, you also need to budget for a logo design.

This can be done for a fee by the web designer or you can pay a graphic designer to design a logo for your website.

Then you need some initial content on your website. The web designer can do this for you or you can do it yourself, or you can employ a copywriter or/and an SEO consultant to write compelling web copies for your website that will be search engine friendly and draw sales to your business.

An SEO will also ensure that the structure and layout of your website is search engine friendly as well as help you develop strategies that will increase website traffic.

Some plug-ins may also be required to add some unique features you are demanding. So, the more features you want on your business website the steeper the cost of design and development.

Note that a web designer will have in his team or experts network, professionals who can help in all the components of web design enumerated here. So, you can rely on your web designer for these services.

Cost of web design for a standard 5-page website can range from $500 to $5,000. In Nigeria designing a 5-page business website should cost you from 75,000 Naira.

If you decide to design the website on your own, there are various routes you may decide to take.

First, you can build on WordPress and find some WordPress themes to use for your design. Secondly, you can choose to build your website using templates.

Another option is to go with a free website builder, which can enable you build a fully functioning website in minutes with no technical knowledge, though with some limitations.

However, the best website builders are premium ones that you pay monthly or annual fee for.

4. Cost of Website Promotion

This one is ignored by most businesses. Some businesses think that once they design a website, the millions of people on the internet will just start trooping in.

Well, as at September 2020 there were at least 5.29 billion pages in the indexed web according to worldwidewebsize.com. All these pages are seeking the attention of the 4.5 billion people who currently have internet access according to internetworldstats.com.

You need to allocate some budget for website promotion. For example, you can use search marketing to promote your new website on search engines (like Google Adwords).

You can also use social media marketing to promote your website on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. You can pay an SEO and/or SMM consultants to help with these. Offline promotions are not out of place.

You should also allocate money to update your business cards and other printed materials to include your new website. This simply depends on your budget.

You can decide to ignore it completely, but it could be a big mistake. We recommend allocating at least $100 (36,000 Naira) per month to this cost component.

The beauty of online promotions is that you can easily track performance. This will enable you experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

5. Cost of Website Management & Maintenance

This is another cost component ignored by some businesses. Building a website is not a one-off thing; you need to allocate money for its management and maintenance.

You need to connect your offline business to your website. So, any change in your business like new products, price updates, job vacancies, business expansion, etc should be reflected on your website.

This also means that after the initial web design you still need to update your website when necessary. You can do this yourself, employ someone else to do it for you, or outsource the service to the web designer or a copywriter.

To make it easy to update your website, invest in a web design package that includes a content management system (CMS). This will make updating some aspects of your website like the content easy. In fact with a Content Management System, you can do it yourself.

Going for the cheap web design options is okay if you have a tight budget, but paying the cost for a system that is easily updatable may save you some management cost.

If your website includes a blog, you may even need updates more often. Similarly, you can employ the web designer, a blogger or a copywriter to help out, or you can do it in-house.

A website at some point will need to be redesigned or upgraded. For example, you can start with a static website, but with plans to upgrade to a more versatile website with CMS in some months or years. You may just want to change the layout or structure to reflect your new brand status.

Other ongoing cost you may capture yearly in your website management budget includes SEO (for link building, keyword research, web analytics, and optimisation for search traffic), SMM (for social engagement with customers and potential customers, and advertising your products), Online Advertising (Google Adwords, Classified Ads, Adbrite, Bidvertiser, Facebook), annual web hosting costs, annual domain cost, annual cost for SSL certificates etc.

If the plug-ins or template/theme you are using on your website requires an annual paid license, you should also factor it into your budget.

6. Cost of SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is part of the ongoing maintenance of your website. I decided to give it it’s own heading to emphasize its importance.

It is all about making your website rank better on search engines like Google. SEO is one of the most important ways to drive traffic and visitors to your website.

SEO is a recurrent cost. It cost you anywhere between $250 to $10,000 monthly to get SEO services. Part of the services will include regular SEO Audit, as well as technical SEO, link building, and keyword research.

You will need to develop an SEO strategy to drive traffic to your website.

So, What is the Cost of Building Websites

I am sure you came here looking for a specific price, but the cost of building websites differ widely as each website is unique in its own way. While one may cost $1000 dollars, another may cost $3000.

My recommendation if you are planning to build a website is that you allocate at least $300 for the initial design and $250 per year for annual maintenance. Or if you are in Nigeria, ₦75,000 for initial design work and ₦50,000 annual maintenance cost.

The cost guideline above is for the simplest of websites. If you want to add some bells and whistles, be ready to pay more.

Note that the annual maintenance cost will not include items like marketing, SEO, content updates, etc

Note that these are the rock bottom prices for the most basic of websites. The actual cost will depend on the type of hosting your website requires and the skill level of the professionals you wish to engage in the project.

These cost components are not meant to scare you. You do not have to spend in all of them. If your business is still small, you can handle some of the tasks yourself. Just don’t ignore them entirely.

Credit to: Paschal Okafor

The post Website Design – Cost of Designing a Website in Nigeria appeared first on Macvertech.

The days of people engaging with websites exclusively on the desktop are over.

With our years of experience as one of the website designers in Nigeria, we have come to understand that Mobile optimization is a must. Responsive design allows your website to look great and operate flawlessly on every device from desktop to mobile. The more planning and development put into making a website responsive, the more likely it is to look great on all devices that your users visit and search with.

Macvertech Design’s team of web developers transforms designs into rich, interactive websites that are intuitive, user-friendly, and responsive. As one of the website designers in Nigeria, We’re experts in content management systems, front-end and back-end web development, and custom integrations.

Your website should leap off the screen to clearly communicate your brand’s image, message, products, and services – and be an accurate reflection of everything your company stands for. Plus, it needs to be mobile-friendly, SEO optimized but easy to navigate

We build creative, mobile-responsive websites that yield user-friendly experiences with fewer bounces, more click-throughs, and higher conversion.

Every web development project is unique and we want to get to know your company, understand your needs, and determine an appropriate timeline and project plan tailored to your business.

We begin the website development process by analyzing your brand and target audience.

CUSTOMER INSIGHTS IN WEBSITE DESIGNERS IN NIGERIA

Think you know your customers well but we do know them than you. Macvertech has provided IT service to many client and we will continue to render relentless services to the world

FROM HERE TO THERE IN WEBSITE DESIGNERS IN NIGERIA

We can’t set and measure goals if we don’t know where you started. We’ll audit your current website, SEO and marketing efforts and set benchmarks based on where you want to go.

WHO ARE YOUR COMPETITORS?

Every business has a competitor and it is our sole responsibility to research about them and understand what they are up to so that we can be able to come up with an idea on how to place your website above them.

So, we will take time to study and get the keywords that your clients used to search online on similar products or services your business offer so that we can be able to key in the words.

We’ll research their websites to see what content is resonating with their audience and how effective their keywords.

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