What does a small business owner do when they want to build an effective website? Usually, the first step is searching Google or GPT for ‘website development.’ Soon enough, they discover a competitive—sometimes chaotic—marketplace with wildly varying prices and countless question marks.
This step-by-step guide will lead you through the entire process, from initial planning stages through final decision-making.
The guide is based on knowledge and experience
Throughout my career, I’ve planned and participated in projects of every type: complex websites for corporations and companies, including international markets, and compact sites for small and medium businesses.
Today I continue to guide businesses large and small through digital planning projects, website development, and marketing & content system management in the digital space. This means the guide you’re reading is based on current, practical knowledge.
Let’s begin…
Think Again: 3 Basic Questions
Many business owners are reconsidering the investment in a website. Most activity happens elsewhere, on social media, and organic traffic is challenging to build. But the traffic you do gain is pure gold—people who walked the extra mile to visit you and ultimately contact you. Your best opportunities and leads come from your website.
A website is the home base for marketing, sales promotion, and customer service in the digital age. Even when most activity happens elsewhere, a home base is essential.
Can You Succeed Without a Website in the Social Media Era?
You can, but it’s not advisable. A website serves as the most official representation of your business. If prospects want to investigate deeper, that’s where they would go. It must be comprehensive and helpful.
The website is the primary source for content across all your digital channels including your social channels. So, when there’s no website, social channels are poor.
If you want to leverage the power of search engines and AI platforms (SEO and AIO) and support real-time consideration and sales processes, a website is your most effective solution.
One of the important roles of social media platforms, led by Facebook, is to support your website and amplify its effectiveness by using your site’s content as the foundation for posts, campaigns, and engagement across all channels.
What About AI? Does It Change Everything?
You’ve probably heard about AI tools transforming digital marketing. It’s true—AI is revolutionizing everything from content creation to data analysis to process automation.
But here’s what doesn’t change: your website’s fundamental purpose. A website still needs to serve your business strategy and drive customer acquisition, growth, and retention.
AI enhances how effectively your website does these things—through chatbots, smart search, lead automation, and optimization for AI platforms like ChatGPT—but it doesn’t replace the need for strategic planning and proper specification.
For further information: Why Your Business Still Needs a Website in the AI Era.
Can You Start with a Small, Compact Website?
You can, and it’s often recommended. Even a single-page website that serves as your digital business card can make a significant difference. And if you build it correctly and thoughtfully, you can grow quickly and cost-effectively.
Four factors determine your starting point:
- Do you know what kind of website will best serve your business long-term?
- Do you have a long-term action plan and know how to reach the right website for you?
- What budget do you have to establish your internet presence? (initial budget)
- What budget can you dedicate on an ongoing basis—monthly/quarterly/annually—for website development and maintenance?
Introduction: Before You Start Building a Website
Ready to build a dynamic business website? Here are some things worth knowing and preparing in advance.
You have two important reasons to build a business website: potential customers and existing customers. Both will use your website to choose you for their needs.
A website development project includes 4 phases
- Website and project planning
- Website specification
- Building the launch-ready website—technology infrastructure, design, content
- Website management—maintenance, development, and promotion
Each of these phases includes sub-phases and many tasks, which we’ll review in this guide, step by step.
Before you start building a website—even before you begin specification—it’s worth looking at the project from above, then diving into the small details.
How Much Does a Website Cost? The Short Answer
Yes, this is always everyone’s first question: ‘how much does a website cost?’
And you already know the answer—there isn’t one answer. And that’s really the case.
At this stage, you need an indication of the cost for a basic marketing website that immediately allows you to display any amount of information about your business (any website, even the simplest, can contain an infinite amount of information pages, subject to storage capacity), using a customized design template, with a flexible infrastructure that can grow into an online store, online services, etc.—as needed and according to plan.
One-Time Costs
- Basic designed information website ready for content: $3,000 – $8,000
- Addition of basic online store: $3,000 – $8,000
Usually, the setup cost includes specification as well. Sometimes it’s worth considering separate specification documents at additional cost.
Content preparation is budgeted separately, with costs depending on the amount and type of content needed. A common basis for calculation is $75-150 per content page. $15-30 for entering a page.
Ongoing Annual Costs
- Domain management: ~$50
- Web hosting: ~$200-500 (hosting costs vary based on volume and application usage)
Optional Ongoing Annual Costs
- Technical maintenance: $600 – $800 (upgrades, updates, backups)
- Design template updates: $350
- Licenses for plugins and services: depending on each paid plugin/service installed on the site
Custom design, based on an existing design template, might add $1,500 – $3,500 to the project. Developing a completely custom design template costs at least $3,500.
Surprise! With some time investment, you can build a basic website yourself, meaning at no cost (except hosting, etc.).
Website Planning: Before Thinking About Design, Content, SEO, and Everything Else
Yes, before thinking about design, content, search engines, and everything else—we’ll get to that too—you need to understand the business and operational implications of a website, and familiarize yourself with the range of options for digital marketing, online sales, and online customer service.
Website planning should give you answers to several questions:
- What kind of website will contribute most to business performance—increasing revenue and reducing costs?
- How long will it take to achieve such a website with your available budget?
- What resources are required to manage the website at each stage along the way?
Even if you’re certain you need a beautiful business card website with some information pages and a ‘contact us’ form, it’s worth basing the decision on organized planning. If you later want to upgrade the website’s capabilities, you’ll know where you’re heading and can do it more quickly.
Website Specification: Don’t Start Without It
Website specification is a phase that many skip to save time or money, or both. There’s no bigger mistake than this. A website built without proper specification soon reveals itself as unmanageable and, as a result, ineffective.
What’s important to remember now is simple: don’t invest a minute or a dollar in design and development before you have a technical and functional specification document, including for your long-term plans.
What to Prepare Before Starting Website Development
You have a plan, you have a specification document, and maybe you already have quotes for design and development; you’re almost ready to build a website. But wait—there are several things to prepare for the project:
- Domain
- Google account
- Web hosting
- Management system
- Development workspace
- Design template
Preparing Website Content and SEO Optimization
While your website is being built, you prepare the content and the promotion plan.
Website Development: The Planning Phase
It’s worth planning several steps ahead, even when there’s only the possibility for a basic website development project.
A Website is a Facility
A website needs to be beautiful, clear, user-friendly, and optimized for search engines. All true and important, but above all, a website needs to serve business purposes.
The specification, design, and navigation—all these are steps in the process of building a website, and they need to match the business and commercial goals of the website:
- Supporting sales and customer acquisition processes
- Supporting service and customer retention processes
No less important is matching the website to the business’s financial and operational capabilities:
- How long will it take to achieve your “dream website” with your available budget?
- What resources and tools are required to manage the website at each stage along the way?
What is Your ‘Dream Website’?
There are differences between B2B and B2C websites, between sites for complex and simple products, expensive and cheap, in broad markets and niche markets. Many factors influence how a website looks, what it contains, and how it’s managed. But every business, large or small, international or local, has the same fundamental needs:
- Business card
- Catalog
- Customer service and relations
- Customer and user support
- E-commerce/sales promotion
- Flexibility, control, and oversight
Can You Afford to Plan a ‘Dream Website’?
Maybe not immediately, maybe not quickly, but ultimately every business can achieve a dream website with answers to all six fundamental needs and unique requirements. Every business at its own pace and within its own budget.
Therefore, it’s worth planning with forward thinking, even if the budget and resources are sufficient only for part of the dream, or maybe even just a minimal website. But if there’s a vision and a plan, when the budget becomes available, you can progress quickly.
This is the principle: dream big, start small, and progress as fast as possible.
Learn for Plan
To plan with forward vision, you need to thoroughly understand the business processes, problems, strengths, and behavioral characteristics of different customers. With this knowledge, you can think about solution directions and weigh each against budgets and resources.
Note: In the planning phase, you don’t need to decide and choose, but only analyze needs, understand the range of possibilities—including those not within reach—understand gaps between desired and current states, and try to define priorities.
The output includes a wishlist, options list, and capabilities list.
The planning process is primarily a learning process – of the business and the digital arena – enabling approach to the specification phase, where practical decisions begin to be made.
Website Development: The Specification Phase
Specification is a working tool, the roadmap for website development, and actually for digital marketing as a whole.
Time to Decide What happens
In a website development project, specification is the phase where you answer all the questions that start with “what happens when…”:
- A visitor arrives at the homepage?
- A user clicks a button or link?
- A visitor searches for an answer?
- A customer wants to make contact?
You should get these answers from a specification expert. Hint: not a designer or developer, but a professional who understands processes.
Design and development are performed according to the specification that was delivered by that same professional. A serious specifier will consult with the intended designer and developers during the specification phase.
Everything you prepared in the planning phase is the initial brief for the specifier.
Website Specification Includes 5 Integrated Deliverables
- Content specification
- Technology specification
- Functional specification
- Display specification
- Work plan
You can and should specify with forward vision; not just what you’re implementing in the immediate phase, but specify the dream website you thought about in the planning phase.
Specification is a working tool for developers, designers, and managers—accompanying the website in advanced phases too, when implementing small and large dreams.
The specification document is the website’s roadmap, and actually for digital marketing as a whole.
The Design Phase
Website design is a product of website specification. The specification document includes the set of guidelines and requirements for the designer. Obviously, design needs to relate to the brand—logo, colors, design language, marketing tone, etc.
Design deliverables
- Framework – site header including main navigation menu, and site footer
- Components – forms, buttons, icons, frames, etc.
- Templates – for each major page type and block
Sketches serve as working tools for website developers and need to include clear definitions for colors, spacing, and effects.
Design Principles Worth Following
Simplicity – Your website needs to look attractive, but complex design can be charming at first glance and very annoying when you need to start working with the website regularly. The balance between initial impact and ongoing usability is critical.
Simplicity saves a lot of development time and costs. In advanced website building technologies, you can always upgrade the design later.
Clarity – Both visual and conceptual. Visual clarity relates to comfortable reading, viewing, and browsing. Visitors shouldn’t have to strain while trying to use and benefit from your website.
Continuous usability – Things should look and work the same on computers, phones, and tablets.
The Implementation Phase
In the implementation phase, magic happens when all the ideas, specifications, designs, and tools connect – by the code professionals – into a content & marketing machine.
If all previous phases were done properly, implementation will be easy and fast, as developers know exactly what they need to do and what results they need to achieve.
Business owners who went through the process together with the professionals can also understand what’s being developed for them and oversee the implementation.
What’s Next?
Launching the new website isn’t the end of the road—it’s the beginning. A website is like a child that needs to be raised, educated, taught, and nurtured.
