Why A Licensed Website Might Be Right For Your Company
Need a website up quickly?
On a budget?
Don’t want to worry about any of the following?
- Picking the right hosting provider
- Setting up a hosting account
- Maintaining that hosting account
- Maintaining your website
- Paying someone to make changes to your website
Want someone else to handle all of this work for you?
- Website design
- Copywriting
- Website development
- Hosting
- Maintenance
- Backups
- Support
If you answered yes to any of the above, a licensed website may be the right choice. Much like leasing a car, licensing a website has a much lower upfront and monthly cost while taking away the headaches that come with ownership.
To continue on the car theme, most people don’t realize that owning a website requires ongoing maintenance — not just to the website itself but to the server where it resides. There is also the hassle of selecting the right hosting account, selecting the right company to build your website, finding a copywriter to write content for all of the pages of your website, selecting the right company to maintain your website and server moving forward, and more. If you then want to market your website, you’ll most likely need to find another company to do that.
Save Time and Money
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn to one company that would handle all of this for you for a low monthly fee?
This is where a licensed website really helps busy professionals who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars budgeted and months of time to wait for the new site to be live.
A licensed site typically goes live in a quarter of the time of a custom website project — think 30 days as opposed to four months.
A licensed site also is a fraction of the cost. You usually are looking at a few thousand dollars for the initial setup and then a low monthly fee, which covers support, hosting and all of the maintenance necessary.
You might wonder what the trade-off is here. If a licensed website is less expensive, low maintenance and can be live in a few weeks, why would anyone want a custom website? First, a licensed website has limitations that are acceptable to most businesses, but not all. With any provider of a hosted website solution, it is important to learn about the limitations of the platform so that you understand what can and cannot be done so that you are able to make an informed decision about which direction you want to go for your new website.
Second, some businesses prefer to own rather than rent. Again, just like a leased car, you do not own a licensed website; when you stop paying for it, it goes away.
We have seen many clients take advantage of this option in order to get a site up quickly and inexpensively with great success. This option is especially useful for small- to medium-sized businesses with no current website or an old, outdated website.
In terms of lead generation, the reduced timeframe for getting the site up and running provides an important fringe benefit: enabling an online marketing campaign to kick off months earlier than what is possible with a custom website build.
