If you are either a bootstrapped startup, freelancer, NGO or maintaining an open-source project, you want to save on your website costs. You want to make sure that you have a professional-looking website so that people take you seriously.
There are hundreds of companies or freelancers who can set up the web infrastructure for you and create a beautiful website. They not only cost a lot of money to design and set up, but you also get charged for hosting, especially with a custom domain.
When you are just starting out, it makes sense to save on these costs especially if you are technically oriented. It’s also important that you don’t spend too much time on creating a sustainable infrastructure instead of concentrating on your core business.
Here are some ways of the top ways that you can get a professional website and blog up and running without too much effort:
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Create an account on wordpress.com. Based on the template that you choose, you can set up a professional company website.
- Pros
- Easy to setup. You can also buy a domain name via wordpress.com.
- Cons
- Displays ads with the free version. You need to pay money in order not to see the ads.
- Pros
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Use a service like: Carrd
- Pros
- Easy to set up. You can buy a domain name via their service.
- Cons
- It’s a one-page website with the service brand.
- It costs money to remove the services branding.
- Blog pages not available.
- Pros
-
If you use Notion, then this service will be a no brainer: Super. This is a no-code website builder.
- Pros:
- If your content is already on notion, then it should be easy to use.
- It also comes with a Blog template too.
- Cons:
- It costs money to remove the “super” branding.
- Pros:
Static Site generator (a.k.a JamStack)
We also found that we could use Static site generators to get a website up and running quickly. These static site generators can generate a website based on some raw data and a set of templates. You can read more about Static Site generators here.
We chose Hugo, a popular static site generator written in the Go programming language.
Here are the steps we followed to get our website up and running:
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Install Hugo
Took us a few minutes. -
Get a basic website up and running using the instructions here.
Took us an hour at the most. -
Choosing a theme.
This took us a day or two! It takes time to figure out what you want!
We finally chose the beautiful theme -
Become familiar with the Markdown format and syntax.
Don’t get turned off by the markdown format. It’s the same format used by the GitHub readme file. It’s super easy to learn. It took less than 30 minutes to learn it. -
Adding content to the website using markdown format.
This took us 2 days. -
Push your website into a GitHub repo using these instructions.
This took us a few minutes. -
Deploy and publish your website to the world!
There are tons of options out there to do this.
We chose Cloudflare pages for our deployment.
It took us 5 days to get a respectable website up and running.
We took that much time because we did not have out content ready. Also we took our time to choose the right theme for our requirements.
Here is what our website finally looked like after we were done: https://www.suketa.in.
We only paid for the custom domain name. Everything else was free!
The reason we chose a static site generator is because we felt it was not only easy to use but also highly scalable.
Are you interested to know more about the JamStack? Check it out here.
I hope to write more about JamStack in the future.
Hope this Blog post was informative and interesting for you!