Creating a website can be a lengthy task depending on the type of website. This article will explain all the steps and the time they take while creating a website.
Websites are all the rage in this era. From making appointments to selling goods, the growth of websites has been extreme over the last 20 years.
Creating a simple website isn’t a complex process and there are many steps involved in it. You need to choose the right hosting provider, domain name, template, or hire a professional to build it for you.
Because of that. there isn’t a specific number of days that can be given for building a website. However, we can make some general predictions based on experience to see how much building a given website will take.
Let’s take a deeper dive and explore them as well as the steps involved in building a professional website.
Types of websites
There are many types of websites that you can build. However, most of the sites on the internet can be categorized into the following categories:
1. Brochure Websites
A brochure website is a form of an online brochure/business card containing all the basic needed about your business. Most small and medium-sized enterprises usually have a website like that to make it easier for their potential customers to find out more information about the business.
Talking about the brochure website, it usually has around 5-7 pages that include:
- Home Page
- About Us
- Products and Services
- Testimonials
- Contact Details
In addition to all this information, a brochure website can also have a blog that will keep the visitors posted about the latest news as well as some tips/pieces of advice that the business can share with others.
Having a blog section can also help with SEO and content marketing efforts. Even when it is a brochure website, it’s important to think about ways to make it attractive so that customers stay interested and be very clear about the main objective that you want your visitors to accomplish. This can be asking them to contact you, review your offering or sign up for your email list.
On average, building a good brochure website can take up to 4-8 weeks.
2. E-commerce Websites
A purpose of an e-commerce website is to help your company sell products online. Customers can surf your website for the products they want and then buy them through your website. E-commerce websites are easy to use and are preferred by customers as they can quickly look for products, filter them accordingly, know about the sales going on and then purchase what they like.
Once you have an e-commerce website, you can upload new products according to your inventory. A proper e-commerce website should act as a cohesive system that automatically accepts orders online, notifies customers, updates the stock numbers of the inventory, etc.
While designing your e-commerce platform, make sure that you choose a template that matches your business type. Moreover, your website should be attractive, showcasing relevant pictures, products, and deals. It’s also important to pick the right hosting provider, as e-commerce sites require more server resources than an average blog.
Smaller e-commerce websites typically take 6-12 weeks to build while more complex ones can take much longer.
3. Web Applications
In recent years, web applications have come to replace the good old desktop apps. These days you can do almost anything online without having to download and install a desktop app: from photo and video editing software to invoicing apps and online document editing tools like Google Docs.
Probably the most business common model for running a web application is a SAAS (software as a service) subscription model where you typically pay a small monthly/yearly price to use some kind of software.
Some good examples may include online CRM software like Hubspot or online storage like Dropbox.
As you can see, these kinds of websites can be super complex in nature so the time frame to build one is very hard to predict. Besides that, most of the online applications are never “finished”, they’re constantly being developed and have new features being added to them.
If I were to generalize, an online application can take anywhere from 3 months for a basic MVP type application to 1-2 years to build a more complex one.
Now, let’s take a look at how you can create a plan to build your online website.
Create A Plan According To Your Requirements
Planning before implementing is the best way to create a website. If you are a perfectionist, then skipping the planning stage is like calling for trouble.
Here’s what you need to sort out before entering the creation stage of your website:
Determining the type of your website. There are different kinds of websites: from simple ones like brochure websites and simple blogs to more complex ones like e-commerce or membership sites. Once you know what kind of website you’re building, then you will need to pick your hosting provider.
Hosting provider. There are a ton of hosting providers ranging from bad to good. In order to pick the right one for you, it’s important to know the complexity of your website as well as the amount of traffic that it will likely get. Hosting a simple blog that gets 100 views per day requires a lot less from your hosting than running an e-commerce store with 10000 users per hour.
If you’re looking for a good and reliable hosting provider, I suggest signing up for a free trial at Cloudways using my affiliate link here.
A proper sitemap. Websites having a ton of pages can be confusing. A sitemap will come in handy in this case. It will help you better plan and create a hierarchy of pages and start building your website.
These are 3 very basic and essential steps that will help you make your vision for the site much more clear and it will be much easier for you to share these details with your WordPress developer to get a price and time estimate for the job.
After taking all of these steps, you will be set for a good start. Most importantly, never rush any decision during the planning/creation stage because they can have a big impact on the success of the website you’re building.
4 Main Steps of Building a Website
To build a website, there are usually four main stages:
Discovery
This is the very beginning of building a website. At this stage, you will need to think carefully about your idea and how you can transfer and implement that in a form of a website. You can do this process on your own or hire a professional developer or an agency to help you with that. They will usually ask you some questions about the project and create some kind of specification document where all your ideas and requirements are listed.
It’s important not to skip this stage especially for more complex websites as without a clear idea of the scope of work it will be hard to estimate the time and budget required for the project.
Architecture
Once you have your specification ready, you will be thinking about the site architecture. This can involve creating a sitemap and wireframes of the pages that you will have which will show how the user will interact with the system.
Visual Design
Once you have a site architecture in mind, you (or a dedicated graphic designer) will be working on designing the pages of your website. Whether you’re building a simple brochure website or a complex web app, this step is essential for a good user experience and to make sure your website is attractive to potential customers.
Development
Once you have all the planning and the design ready, now it’s time to actually build your website. Most likely, you will need a developer who will be able to take the work you’ve done so far and actually turn it into a real website.
Once the coding is done, you and your developer will work on testing the website to make sure that all the pieces of functionality work properly and that there are no issues.
How Long Does It Take To Review And Launch A Website?
It usually takes 1-2 weeks to thoroughly review a smaller website, apply the feedback and test everything to ensure that the site is mobile friendly and works correctly on different devices and browsers. For more complex ones, it can take longer as naturally the more complex the website is, the longer it takes to review everything.
FAQs
How long does the average website take to build?
It would take 8-12 weeks approximately to build and launch an average website. This involves planning and designing, developing, reviewing, and launching the website.
How much does it cost to hire someone to build a website?
On average, an hourly rate for a good freelance developer can charge between $50-150/hour which can result in $2000-10000 for a smaller website. E-commerce stores usually cost somewhere between $5000-30000 and more complex online apps can cost anywhere from $20000 for an MVP and up to $500000.
Is building a website hard?
Building a website can be a tough job as it involves many nuances like creating a proper site architecture that is intuitive, picking the right technology and hosting, making sure that the site is SEO friendly, etc. However, if you just want a simple website based on a template, you can just buy a premium WordPress theme and adjust the content according to your needs.
Conclusion
The time that it takes to create a website is entirely dependent on the developer’s skill and the requirements of your website.
Hopefully, this blog article was useful to you and can help you understand what is involved in building a website.
