Engaging Website Design Ideas for Startups on a Budget

Startups deal with unique challenges. First, they have a limited amount of money in the bank. Second, their team is mostly compensated through equity – remember, you can’t eat stake. Third, their investors want to generate a significant return on their money in as short a period of time as possible. And finally, they have to fight for every piece of market share in their industry.

It’s a rough life. But a website doesn’t need to add to the stress of launching a startup. This article will help startups designs a website that is engaging, informative and cost-effective.

Free Videos and Images

One-third of online activity involves watching videos. Eye-tracking studies have proven that readers pay closer attention to relevant images than text alone. If you want to build an engaging website, you need to include helpful videos and eye-catching, relevant images on your site.

If you’re worried about licensing costs and legal complications associated with importing high-quality videos and images onto your site, you’re right to be worried. Entire startups have been decimated by a successful lawsuit by a copyright holder.

Thankfully, there are free stock photography sites for securing royalty-free images for your site.

For video content, I recommend producing your own short “How-To” videos. This gives you an opportunity to highlight the people behind your brand – customers want to support people more than brands. Plus you don’t need to pay royalties for content you create yourself.

When uploading videos to your site, be mindful of the format they are in. Depending on how you recorded them, they may not be universally compatible with the devices your customers use to view content on your site. Online video converters can help you ensure content is in a format that works across the entire web (i.e. MP4 or MPEG-4).

WordPress is the best long-term, SEO-Friendly solution.

Please take my word for it. Drag-and-drop website builders are really, really cool. But if your company needs a solution that makes it easy to optimize your site for search engine traffic, WordPress is really hard to beat.

In this guide the writer highlights a WordPress trick that I wasn’t aware of. After you install WordPress on your server, you’re probably going to select from one of the thousands of free themes available. You’ll make this choice based on how the theme looks in the demo site.

The problem is that many themes look a little different from the demo site that sold you on the theme. There’s an XML trick outlined in step 4 of the guide that seems to do wonders. This is a HUGE timesaver if you want to build a WordPress site that’s as engaging as the demo.

Wrapping Up

From selecting powerful images and videos, to building a WordPress site that actually looks as good as the demo theme, I hope I’ve been helpful in giving your startup its best chance to shine online without breaking the bank.

Using these strategies, I’ve been able to build beautiful websites for less than $50. That’s a steal in a world where web design agencies charge thousands of dollars – dollars you can now use on other aspects of your launch.

Good luck!