It used to take considerable expense to create a high-quality company Website, even for small businesses. I just finished a project that confirms that popular and inexpensive Website creation tools are taking much of the development cost and complexity out of building Websites. This is clearly the way that Website creation is going for Websites of all sizes.

Take a look at the new Website I built for the school that my children attend. This was a project I volunteered for a few months ago. The previous Website wasoutdated, incomplete and difficult to update (so difficult that there wasn’t much updating). They really needed a useful new site and I had a little experience with Websites, so I took it on. I started working on it at night and on weekends. Four months and a chunk of my spare time later, the new site was turned on this week.

Total Cash Cost to Build the Site – $350

Using popular tools, I spent a lot less for a much better result than I was expecting. Here’s an honest accounting of the expenses:

• $5 for a domain name I used while working on the site
• $25 for the cool homepage slideshow software
• $40 for a nice pre-built Website template design from Joomlashack
• $15 for several coffees for my web developer friend who contributed a few hours of light technical assistance
• $250 for a graphic designer to improve the images in the site template
• My time? Well, that was priceless (meaning “free”). It was truly about 120 hours of my time for research, meetings and emails, writing, editing and reviewing.

Not including my time, this site cost less than $350 to build. It could have cost $100, but I splurged on graphic design help to improve the template with better pictures and colors. Custom Websites like this cost between $5,000-$10,000 for the programmer or designer’s time, but now they can be built with free Web-based tools that we non-programmers can use ourselves. That’s a big deal.

Web Content Management Systems = Website Creation Platforms

The free, web-based software I used to make the school Website is called Joomla. It is one of the popular Website creation tools known as Web Content Management Systems (CMS). Joomla is a free open-source Web CMS that is ideal for smaller Websites, but there are here are hundreds of CMS tools for any size project. The most popular CMS for blogs is called WordPress (it’s the one I use to create this New Avenue Website). There are more powerful CMS tools, like Drupal, that allow easy content editing for big, custom sites. All these CMS tools allow non-technical people to create, edit and manage content on their Website almost as easily as editing in their word processor.

Joomla, WordPress and other popular Web CMS tools each have large active communities of developers and users who add value to the base software. For Joomla, there are many additional resources available to provide tools or assistance:

• Hundreds of useful software plug-ins called Joomla Extensions that allow you to add features to the base system
• Thousands of third-party Joomla Templates that are complete, pre-built Website designs for free or under $50
• Millions of posts in the Joomla support forum where every question imaginable has been asked an answered by other users

Joomla uses standard Web technologies, so any Web developer can adjust, improve and extend anything in the Joomla system. The combination of the software, the active community of users, and all the add-on features and templates makes it a “platform” for building Websites — not just a single application from a sole vendor.

You may be thinking that free open-source software platforms aren’t ready to run “real” Websites for serious companies, but these systems can do the job quite well and already are used by thousands of companies. I have been in the software business for 20 years and I am impressed with this software: Joomla never crashed, it had all the features I needed in the base software or as add-on extensions, and every support question I had was answered by quickly searching in the support forum. What more could you want?

The more people use these tools, the better the platform gets. The blog revolution has been powered by these easy-to-use tools. The same revolution is coming to the creation of larger Websites.

Now You Can Do It

Web CMS tools are capable and cheap, but that’s not even the most exciting part of the story. The big news is that now regular people can create high-quality Websites without the expense and frustrations of using Web programmers to create custom Websites. We are free at last!

Web CMS tools allow you to add new Web pages, edit the text and images on a page, add new menu items, move things around and manage other site options. This means the Website can advance quickly since we can easily create new and useful content for our audience. To show you what it looks like to work in a Web CMS, below are pictures of the WordPress screen for this blog post and the Joomla screen for one of the school pages.

All big revolutions in software occur when new tools enable the individual to create something incredible all by themselves. From the early days of spreadsheets and desktop publishing software, to today’s web search, YouTube and blogs, the world changes when everyone can do it, not just big companies with deep pockets. This is what is happening at last to the creation of larger Websites.

The Hard Part of Creating Websites

What’s the bad news here? Well, the technical side may be easier than ever, but it’s still up to actual people to create the content, organize the information, design the look and feel, and make it all useful. The brainpower and time is the hard part. It always has been. My technical buddy installed Joomla and the pre-built template in 15 minutes. I spent 120 hours on the rest of the site, and I’m a quick learner of software tools.

The technology is not the problem. As Pogo said in the popular old-time cartoon, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Here’s a rough estimate of how I spent my time to build the site.

• Strategy and Planning (10 hours) – reviewing other sites, planning, tracking tasks
• Research (10 hours) – exploring and investigating to find useful tools and tips
• Meetings and Emails (15 hours) – planning with school staff, requesting information
• Website Setup (20 hours) – creating menus, configuring options, adding features
• Writing Web Pages (60 hours) – writing the actual pages (each page took between 30 minutes and 2 hours to create), getting feedback from others, revising and proofreading
• Adding Pictures (5 hours) – reviewing and resizing pictures, making slideshows

If I had to do it again, I would use the same tools and I could do it in about 75% of the time, taking out the time to research and figure things out for the first time. If you divide the time between a few people, it would be very manageable for most schools or businesses.

Now the school has a useful Website that provides complete information to parents and students, connects our active school community with pictures and news, and attracts new students and donations.

The best part? Students, parents, and teachers are asking for useful improvements and new capabilities for the site, all of which are pretty easy to build. The school Website will be twice as good next year — powered by the people.