GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 34 - February 2016

#9 TheGooner Private Member STEP 7: IMPLEMENTATION Installing your website on a server and doing quality assurance that it all works as designed. What do things cost? A basic website with pages of information and no special features can be set up for $100. Getting good content to fill it might cost $1,000 or $5,000, depending on your requirements. A decent mobile app with good functionality can take $10K to design and build. A unique website with special functions could cost $10K, $25K or $50K. $50K?!! — Now if this all sounds like a LOT of time and expense ... IT IS! But you have got a personalized handcrafted website that does exactly what you asked. But it’s likely to take several months to build, and a good site with mobile functionality could easily cost 5-10 times your strawman budget. However, there are ways to simplify the process and significantly reduce the cost. One way is to buy an “off the shelf” website Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla and have a theme installed. Maybe even have content created and posted into it. This approach is like buying a show home. You get exactly what you see: Nothing less, but nothing more. It’s far cheaper because it’s already built, and they are selling the same thing over and over again. All the design and technical specs are complete, and it’s simply a case of implementation (and content). The downside is there are no unique features; it’s cookie cutter. If you have never created or run a website, this is a good start option. You will quickly come to grips with it and start to get a feel for extra options or modifications that you will want in future versions of your site. Apologies for the long-winded diatribe — and I know it may be stuff you already know and understand — but you are talking about a sizable amount of wedge to spend and I felt it was important to layout the likely process and likely costs. “ Reply With Quote #10 xecutable Private Member I agree with [TheGooner]. There’s no real shortcut to trial and error for the most part no matter how much you try to plan and get feedback from fellow affiliates. At the end of the day, your design, your traffic, your style of writing and your layout will differ, which will affect pretty much everything you can think of. I started with zero knowledge, zero money for investment, and some programming/HTML background. A friend of mine was hosting the site and paid for my old domain name. I was supporting myself by writing posts for a few other sites who let the author use Google AdSense and keep whatever they made (which came to about $400 a month). May sound strange, but I’m glad I got pretty much nothing for two years. Not converting, not receiving traffic, not scoring well on speed/optimization tests, makes you READ and learn. I’d say go for building it yourself. And as your knowledge of what you want it to be and HOW you want it to operate grows, you will adapt to it. You’d see at some point that the whole editing/processing takes a lot more than writing and you’d want to optimize that. I don’t know about the rest, but something that takes me 15-20 minutes now took well over an hour a few years back. If it was me I’d keep that investment and slowly use it month after month on different things and see what works. Of course you are free to do whatever you’d like to, that’s just how I’d proceed. “ Reply With Quote 19 From the GPWA Forums