Launch a professional website for under $1000

You’ve seen those awful, homemade websites with yellow type on royal blue backgrounds, right? When I see a website with garish colors, typos, awkward writing, or bad design, I think immediately:

• These people don’t know what they are doing.
• This company is not a serious business.
• They don’t have a quality product.
• They may be out of business tomorrow.
• I’m not ordering anything from these people.

Your corporate website is your company’s “face to the world” and is the #1 marketing tool you have. As a small business owner or consultant, you only have one chance to make a good impression on potential customers.

In the early days of the Internet, it was hard for a small business owner or consultant to produce a professional website. Each website had to be created from scratch and it required a lot of technical skill and graphic design ability (which costs money) to make it look good.

But now, using a free website builder such as WordPress, you can launch a professional-looking website like this one for under $1000.

Your only yearly recurring cost will be the cost of registering your domain name and hosting your website with a service provider (such as BlueHost.com), which could cost less than $100 per year.

Here are the people I needed to successfully develop and launch this website using WordPress in 2012:

• Project manager / technical writer – managed the entire website development project from initial concept to launch, registered the domain names, planned the site layout, and wrote and updated content.
• Web developer – handled the technical details of getting the website hosted; installed and customized WordPress; set up the database; and tailored a WordPress template (called theme) as needed.
• Graphic designer – designed the graphic elements of the website such as the logo, banner, buttons, headings, and borders.

I served as the project manager and technical writer for this website, but I hired a web developer and graphic designer to help me for the initial launch in 2012. The web developer charged $500 and the graphic designer charged $300.

In the ten years since 2012, it’s gotten much easier to create a professional website. You can choose from thousands of WordPress themes with pre-designed pages, colors, fonts, and formatting, but the best themes still cost money. When I updated this website design in 2021, I was able to do it myself, because WordPress and my skills have improved. But I’m still using the banner graphic designed by the graphic designer in 2012.

It’s fun to pick a WordPress theme and start pouring in content. But things get tricky when you want to customize the design or correct a problem. For example, this website uses the ColorMag theme. It’s one of the best free themes, but it’s got quirks.

For example, the formatting for figure captions is inconsistent—sometimes captions display single-spaced, other captions display double-spaced. After much research, I added some custom Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code that fixed the spacing issue but the captions are still not left-aligned. Another problem is that the spacing between paragraphs is inconsistent. I’m still working on this issue. Yet I bet a web developer could fix these issues easily. 

To keep your site from looking like it came from the Ransom Note School of Web Design, it’s still worthwhile to hire someone to create your company logo, website banner, and to customize your site (if needed).

If your budget permits, hosting companies such as Bluehost.com offer custom website design services. Many web designers have both developer and graphic design skills.

Remember that no one person has all the skills necessary to produce a professional website. So don’t try to do it all yourself. Don’t skimp on the most important marketing tool you have.