How Can a Small Business Have a Good Website If They Can’t Afford UX Design

No matter if you just think about developing your digital product or already have a website of unsatisfactory quality, there is a moment you start thinking of making some new product to boost your business. It may provide your clients with some additional value, or just be a great instrument for potential customers to find your company on the Internet and purchase a service or product from you.

In a perfect world, you look for a company that provides full-service design. They provide you with all the necessary help, conduct customer and competitive research, elaborate UX, develop perfect UI to satisfy your demands and expectations of the users. It is a great affordable quality website design service but there is the right price for the quality. 

Unfortunately, for small businesses, the beautiful dream is sometimes destroyed once they start searching for a company and find out the services are quite expensive. We know that not only new businesses sometimes cannot afford a website, but also mature and stable small businesses face financial difficulties while developing the website. 

How to Save Money When Building a Website

As for the design and development cost breakdown, the ways to save some money are pretty clear — simplify design, include only basic features, develop MVP — thus, you will be able to cut on the development time.  

What Won’t Save Your Money

Businesses also tend to save money on the stage of research, thinking there is no use of spending money on it if they have some vision of the product. We understand the reasons for it, but our experience and expertise allow us to claim that it is not a sensible decision — UX research is a basis for the future development of the product. To a great extent, it determines how the project will be realized and how successful it will be.

Discover more: UX Research and its importance 

What Is the Most Inexpensive Way to Make a Professional Website

Still, there are few options that may help you to create a good website when you don’t have money for solid UX. Please, note that all of them are not perfect and have their own disadvantages.

What exactly you should do depends on the present state of your business online presence — maybe you have already invested in the website, but now you are unsatisfied with the results. If you already have a website there is an extra way for you to save some money on the website development

Actually, you always can keep things the same, but if the problem has already arisen and you know that the website doesn’t do what it has to then you definitely need help.

What to Do If You Have a Website, but It Doesn’t Work as Needed

In case you already have a website, you can start by hiring a UX designer to conduct a UX audit of the website. UX audit may help to discover the issues that prevent the website from working properly and making a profit for the business.

Moreover, the audit can reveal that there is no need for a full website redesign, maybe you can do with some fixes. Such a reduction of a workload can save your website budget significantly. Unfortunately, such a method can’t be applied in case you are going to build a website from scratch.  

The Cheapest Way to Make a Good Website If You Don’t Have One

In this case, there are three paths to follow: 

• Apply for a website builder

• Hire a UI/UX designer

• Hire a design agency

The first option is to apply for online services (so-called website builders) to create a website yourself — this is one of the cheapest ways to build a website. Such a DIY website will provide some minimal online presence for your business, but there is a set of obvious drawbacks of this method. We have already discussed them in detail in one of our articles, now we will just mention the most important issues. 

Firstly, website builders do not provide proper data structure and code structure, that is why they cannot be thoroughly SEO optimized. 

Secondly, such builders usually offer to make a one-page website which won’t work well for your business. To make Google bots see the website, it must be multi-page and constantly growing. 

Moreover, when you consider making the website, you see it as a great one, the one to show how special your business is and be remembered. Unfortunately, websites made by means of builders are as like as two peas — they will be comparatively nice, but nobody will remember having seen them. 

Also, builders don’t provide you with the actual domain name. What you get is a template on a builder’s domain. Not bad — but not good either.

Discover more: Why you shouldn’t use website builders

The next options both still require some minimal budget for UX design. They can be helpful in your case. Freelance UI/UX designer can provide affordable web design services, and either fix the existing small business website design or make a new one. The greatest benefit here is a price. It is much cheaper than hiring the agency, so the option sounds quite reasonable.

Read more about how to hire ux designer or contact us to discuss further cooperation.

Still, there is a couple of problems with hiring a freelance specialist. The first one is the unreliability of such a person. There is no guarantee that they will work on the product until it is polished. Moreover, UI/UX designer is not the only person you need to create a website. There are motion designers, illustrators and developers to take part (If we don’t make website MVP).

So, at first glance, it looks like a nice way to save some money, but in fact, it is hard to predict how much resources you will spend on website building if you apply to freelance services.

A more expensive, but more controlled option is hiring a design agency. It supposes a team that will take care of everything and provide all the answers you need and makes the development right at the start — conduct research, develop elaborated UX and UI, make a clickable prototype.

Discover more: Importance of UX for websites

A design agency will make sure the product meets your requirements, users’ demands and works well. They will take care of every stage of the development, including the launch stage and may help with the content and SEO. Sure, hiring a team is comparatively expensive, but the successful online presence is always about a serious approach. 

The website created by the group of professionals considering all the traps and pitfalls will provide you with a long-term qualitative online presence. Thought question — do you really want to save money on quality?