This time last year, it was definitely very easy for online entrepreneurs to convince businesses to have an online presence or start an online based business. It was considerably affordable depending on how you model your business.

However, I cannot guarantee same right now. No matter how much “website ownership” advantages you sincerely reel out, when it comes to owning a standard website and running a standard social media presence, the price gets really scary. Especially considering that for some certain kind of businesses, making profit from their online presence can be long term or indirect, they probably will not want to see the numerous advantages behind spending such amount of money right now.

Building a standard website involves buying online identity, space, themes, designs, software and various tools and they are sold in United State Dollars (USD).

By this time last year, the price of an available domain name was just about 1500 Naira but right now, it cost about 5000Naira to own a domain name for 1year.

It was possible to get an online space, known as a host, for about 8000Naira but right now, you should budget about 25,000Naira.

For designs, you will probably have gotten something very nice, presentable and tweak-able for about 7000 but now, you should be looking at about 23,000Naira at least.

Not to mention plugins and some other tools necessary to give that finesse to your website and moving to social media promotions. Initially, some bloggers seemed not to be concerned and felt the whole Naira fall situation will not affect them as their Google adsense earnings seems to have increased. It is now very clear that we all are in this together. You earn more but at the end of it, you have to spend big.

Despite the Dollar challenges facing online businesses and branding, it is advised that we look beyond this challenges and join on the online train. Online is the new market. If you are not on it right now, you might never gain the customers you are losing.

And for those who are still struggling between owning a store in the nearest mall and starting up an online store, I will advise you start your online store, grow it with best practices and decide if you really need to pay huge at a mall or not.

Happy new Month!

To build a standard website or blog site for your brand and business, do send a mail to elsie@cruxnnovations.com