The least expensive ways to set up a new website

There's no reason that you can't get a professional look and feel for your online address without breaking the bank, however. Before you start to hammer out all of the details, you'll want to look into finding the right hosting service.

Shared site hosts can be had for as little as £3-10 a month on average according to financial experts. Higher-quality virtual private servers are available starting at around £10, so you should be able to find something that provides the degree of service you're looking for without running up costs. Once you've worked out the hosting details, it's important to consider how you might create the actual site itself.

Though budget web development services do exist, it'd be even less expensive to make everything on your own.

While you might think that designing a site by yourself is difficult, there's no easier way to save cash. Though it does still help to have at least some understanding of HTML, there are a number of site builder tools that can give you a fair amount of creative freedom without making you write much code. The WordPress platform is probably the preeminent tool that you're going to want to look at if you plan on cutting out any intermediaries and do everything by yourself.

Deploying WordPress to a server is surprisingly easy, even if you don't have any experience writing code. It shouldn't be much more difficult than installing any other server-side application. Those who have at least a little command line experience might find that it resembles the process used to install and configure terminal apps.

Since WordPress is a free and open-source platform, you can deploy it without having to pay any license fees. Similar to other open-source packages, you don't get any support if you don't pay but those who don't mind learning how to maintain their configuration from scratch shouldn't have any difficulty with this fact. It's very similar to how users of libre Linux distros don't ever get paid support but do just fine running the OS as a daily driver.

Joomla is another option you'll want to seriously consider if you're going to be developing a site from more or less scratch. Like WordPress, it's a free content management system that simply gives you the freedom to post material without having to code each individual page. It's quickly becoming one of the major players in the industry, so there's a fast-growing user-base that can make it relatively easy to find answers to questions if something goes wrong.

Those who plan on either creating a shopping cart for eCommerce purposes or using surveys to collect information from their customers will want to invest in a piece of form builder software as well, so they don't have to hire a coder each time they want to put together an order form. These are easy to use and incorporate a simple point-and-click interface that make form creation a breeze.

That being said, once you have everything in play you'll still need some way of getting content to post in the first place.

In spite of the fact that it might seem expensive, you may still want to consider working with a team of freelance writers or photographers. You can purchase fairly high-quality content online from a variety of sources, which will help you to provide value-added material to your readership without running up the bills. That being said, even those who hire writers will want to author at least some portion of their articles themselves.

Those who plan on selling any sort of product online will want to write as many of the production descriptions on their own as they can. This might start to get tedious, so you may consider looking for a writer here as well. See if you can find a service that provides a bulk discount for hammering out a number of descriptions.

Regardless of where you get the content, get rid of any sliders used to display it. In fact, you'll want to cut out quite a bit of unessential content.

Hosting providers will often charge you more if they have to process a greater amount of downloaded material for your site. Therefore, it stands to reason that you want things as light as possible. Take down anything you don't need. A simple stark background takes up less bandwidth than a pretty picture. Videos can be hosted on a social sharing site like YouTube as opposed to directly from the infrastructure you rent. Take out unnecessary images too, since these can slow things down.

Though it might seem like a lot of work now, sticking to all of these tips will help ensure that you don't have to pay any more to create a site than you truly need to.

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