“Small business owners are often constrained with a budget lower than $5,000 for building a website."
That's Ali Sayeed who told us, but despite budget limitations, the Aleph Website co-founder believes it is possible to create functional and effective websites without breaking the bank.
In this interview, we explore how to make every dollar count when creating an effective website.
Who Is Ali Sayyed?
Ali Sayyed is the co-founder of Aleph Website, a company focused on helping entrepreneurs and small business owners navigate the complex world of web technologies. He also serves as the Senior SEO Analyst at One Identity and he previously held marketing roles in several U.S. agencies.
Websites as marketing tools rely on appealing look, but also on user experience, functionality, and other key elements that will ensure tangible business growth and customer engagement.
In light of this, I asked Ali how businesses with tight budgets under $5,000 can get valuable sites that effectively meet all these criteria.
“To these companies, this is a big investment, and they want to make sure they get a bang for their buck. Fortunately, building a simple website doesn’t have to be expensive.
So, getting started, businesses can build a simple website (ten-pager) and focus on the most important product/service they have at the time,” Ali explains.
He notes that with time, small businesses can re-hire designers to keep investing and improving their websites in terms of new pages, products, and functionalities.
Ali shared with me a project when a client, Flux Wrks, hired Aleph Website to build a website for $2,000.
“In the USA, most marketing agencies are out of reach for small business owners. The fashion designers from Flux Wrks had an Instagram page, but no website. Given that they had a lot of high-quality images, we knew the job was going to be relatively easy!
Cheap sites must focus on functionality and a single objective to ensure customer satisfaction and results. That’s exactly what we did; by emphasizing their skills as fashion designers, we built a simple website that does exactly what it was intended to (lead users to schedule a showing).
This goes beyond web design, as customers may come directly from Google using the Knowledge Graph from Search Engines,” he notes.
Business Owners Are Emotionally Tied to Their Brand Image
Speaking of tight budgets, to save on costs, very often businesses have their branding done by one agency and their website by another, which may cause inconsistency.
Hence, I was curious if Aleph Website has faced a similar situation where a client's established branding conflicted with design principles.
Ali says that most clients approach them with a solidified brand image, meaning colors, messaging, font, and logo have been around for some time.
“We rarely advise the client to change anything around the brand. From our experience, business owners are emotionally tied to their brand image and do not accept brand makeover recommendations.
Instead, we work tightly with the customer to replicate the brand spirit in a few mock-ups and try to showcase our skills by impressing the customer with a mock-up that resembles what the brand stands for (in terms of color, font, and the general look and feel),” he adds.
If you're looking for a web design agency to help you increase brand awareness and conversions, be sure to check DesignRush's listing of top web design agencies.
Custom-Made Websites Are Reserved for Businesses
Ali and I touched upon their web design and development process. He highlights that most often they use WordPress for CMS and Astra theme for the building block. For specific customers, the agency also uses Webflow.
Ali suggests that they develop custom websites where they avoid using pre-made templates and only use plugins if specifically requested by the customer.
However, when it comes to small businesses, most of the time it is practical to build sites using themes to keep costs manageable for clients with limited budgets. Otherwise, the cost would be at least $50,000.
Additionally, he emphasizes that many clients don't want custom websites due to the high maintenance and hands-on effort required.
“A fully custom-made website is a product reserved for tech-savvy business owners that are in for a long-term partnership with us,” he adds.
To build a custom website, the team at Aleph Website starts with a light theme like Astra, then manually creates pages and custom-code features. Then, they test across devices and stages to ensure stability. Finally, they perform multiple client revisions and maintain communication to fix bugs. If issues arise, they use backups to restore functionality.
Watch our video to learn how to successfully brand your (small) business.
There are certainly clients who would rather go with website builders and templated designs. Considering this, I asked Ali which platforms are the best to handle high traffic without crashing.
He notes that they primarily use WordPress with Elementor Pro as their preferred site builder. However, some business owners opt for Wix or Shopify for their DIY simplicity and specific goals.
“Hosting is also a big part of the overall performance. For us, SiteGround and BlueHost have been very consistent and reliable,” he adds.
Commenting on the challenges web designers face with fast-loading websites being one of the top concerns, Ali says that loading speed is always a challenge with complex sites, especially ones running on clunky templates.
I also wanted to know how he suggests optimizing website performance and speed, particularly for image-heavy or content-rich sites.
This was his answer:
“From our experience, CDNs can boost speed performance. We use Cloudflare which offers CDN, caching, and security services—all of which lead to an improved user experience that is subjectively felt as an increase in interaction speed.”
Ali describes their project for MBD Fabricators which wanted to exhibit their work but didn’t care much in terms of site speed, or the backend. Their focus was to get it done at the lowest price possible and help us feature our work online.
To make sure the website was fast, responsive, and easy to deliver, they used a good template for WordPress.
Employ Marketing-Oriented Design Principles To Enhance UX
Given that websites are powerful marketing tools, Ali suggests designers apply the following marketing-oriented design principles to enhance user experience:
- Keep web design simple
- Focus on negative space and punch-line content
- Emphasize important keywords and reduce the amount of content
- Ensure the page's look and feel consistently reflect the brand
- Design each page with a single function
- Aim for users to complete the page's function in under 30 seconds
“The challenge here is always educating the client on why we do what we do. Business owners always want more, but ‘more’ is not always better than ‘less’,” he adds.
Transitioning to the topic of technological advancements, Ali and I discussed how the rise of AI in web design presents both opportunities and challenges.
This was his input on this matter:
“I would argue that AI increases productivity, a great example is AI tools for lead generation, but it doesn’t necessarily result in better web design. Sometimes, we want to take our time and build pages manually, instead of bulk-creating the website because then we are confronted by another form of templatized websites.
We should use AI but only for very specific redundant tasks—more in the field of coding and copywriting, rather than web design.”
Lastly, I asked Ali about his opinion on the major web design trend.
“In a nutshell, we expect an explosion of new brands and many one-man-show websites (or one-woman!),” he highlights.
Ali believes it's easier than ever to create a brand and website in 2024. With improving web solutions, anyone can have a site in days. More people are likely to leave traditional jobs to start their own ventures, especially with AI acting as a personal assistant in brand building.
