What Do I Need to Build A Website?
Costs associated with having a website are:
- Hosting
- Domain Registration
- Payment Gateway Fees (if you are accepting automated payments)
- Design Fees (If you are not doing it yourself)
- Marketing/SEO/Maintenance
So, what are these things?
Hosting
A web hosting service (often shortened to web host) is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients that stores your website and information. You pay these fees monthly, but if you pay annually, you tend to get a discount. Hosting starts at $25+GST per month and will depend on how may items you have in your shop and how many orders you get per month. This includes SSL and is scalable.
Domain Registration
Your domain is the URL of your website. e.g. www.mybusiness.co.nz
Although this is something you can pay for monthly, it is a good idea to register for it as long as you can, e.g. 1 year or 2 years or more as it shows longevity in Googles eyes and that will help your search ranking. You can use a domain registered elsewhere or one with us which is $29+GST year for .co.nz and .nz domains.
Payment Gateway Fees
If you are e-commerce, or taking payments through your website, you will need to register with someone to take care of your payments, whether it is online banking, credit cards or a buy now pay later system. Each payment gateway charges it's own fees, but there is no additional charge to use these.
Our recommended platform does allow manual internet banking if you want to avoid any payment gateway fees, it is just a little more labour intensive for you.
Design Fees
We provide a DIY build service which enables you to use a template to create your own site. However, if you do not have the time or the inclination to do your own site, I can build your site for you with best practices in mind or just tweak things that you can't quite get right. Your site is built in stages, with payment installations or I can do tasks by the hour.
Are there any other costs?
Depending on what platform you use, there may be other ongoing costs. e.g. Wordpress requires regular monthly maintenance of plugins/security/updates/backups or you may want a special plugin or functionality that is not included in the base prices.
Marketing and SEO are your other considerations. A website will slowly gain organic ranking if best practices are followed, but you do still need to actively drive the right people to your site.
Although I work with most platforms, I do support a NZ owned company that has been operating for 20+ years. You don't have to worry about security or plugins with them and you can see the functionality included with their platform here: