I saved $14,83 on the build of this website and I want to show you exactly how I did it. This video is being brought to you today by Cloudways. Cloudways is who I use to host all of my websites. We'll talk about them briefly a little bit later on in this video. This is a website that I built for the Music Association of Canyon County, a freelance group that creates music and they have several different groups. And so this is a website with a little bit of complexity and they asked me to put this together for them and I knew what it would cost them if they went out to another agency or at least I had an idea. So I decided um just for the sake honestly for your sake to find out how much this would have cost if they'd gone to a traditional agency and then I want to show you what it cost to build it myself. Now I get it if you're concerned about building a website for your business for your organization and you just think I don't have the skills. I don't know how uh to do this. It's going to take forever. It's not worth my time. I want to help disabuse you of that. So, I'm going to walk through most of probably your biggest questions and help you understand how to overcome those barriers. Let's just say, okay, so if you want to be able to build a website with a little bit more complexity, with just a little bit more functionality, this is your video because I'm going to give you the first steps so that you know where to go from here to build that out yourself. But let's talk cost first. This this is so compelling. All right, let's dive into it. So, let me tell you what it is that makes this website complex. It's actually not that much, but in terms of somebody charging you to build it, it does make it more complex. The first thing is that it's not a single website. This is actually four websites in one. The first website is this macidaho.org and that is the highlevel organization. But then they have several different music groups, right? They have a symphony. And so, when I go to the symphony, you'll notice it's a it's it is a subdomain. Now, the way I have it working, the type of subdomain where it's like the root directory is the same. So, it's macidaho.org/cycount symphony, whereas I could have built it, so it's Canyon County Symphony.midaho.org. We decided to go this direction, which it does make a difference, but it's actually a separate website and so it has its own separate menu. It's the little bit different menu. The footer menu can be different. All of them have this Mac logo that points back to the main website, but you'll notice the logo that shows up here is the Symphony logo. And it has a lot of different things that are specific to this. Like if you want to join the symphony, you click join us and it's all specific to the symphony. But if what you want is to learn more about the main organization or whatever, you're going to have to go back to that main site. Also, all the events across all the sites are hooked together. So, if I click on that one, it's actually taking me off of the sub website and back to the main one. That's another complexity I have here is I have events. This just required a specific plugin that makes it easy to create events. And each of these can have an image. It's I just create essentially an event listing. And right now, these are just placeholders. They'll actually have images and all sorts of things, links to go buy tickets and all of that built in here to the website. But here's the other thing that makes this really complex. In addition to it actually being four websites and in addition to having events and things, it also needed to be able to have membership because all the people in the organization need to be able to access certain content that's just for them. Rehearsal schedules. They need to be able to pay dues to be a part of the organization. All that kind of stuff. And for that, we wanted to be able to collect information from each of those people. So, we had to build a custom registration form, which a lot of membership plugins don't let you do that builtin. In fact, the one I used didn't either. And so, we need that information to be part of their user profile. But we also wanted them to be able to um have a user dashboard. So, when I log in, I'll be able to see my own dashboard and be able to see what payments I've made for my dues. Here's a demo account that I created where it's got a link to go pay my dues. I can see events that are these are events for members only that's tied to a Google calendar that's embedded here. And then I've got the rehearsal schedule. So I can see for this upcoming rehearsal who needs to be there when and all of that. And I've got it. This is just an embedded Google doc. And so the director of this organization can just go update a Google doc and not have to worry about getting here on the website. And then further down here I can see some member information. And then I could see payment history and I could manage my payment methods. All of that. And that's all stuff that can be done through plugins but it requires setup. And so when you have these kinds of features on a website and you try to pay an agency to build it, the cost goes up substantially over just a basicformational website. If you have a basic info website, you got a homepage and maybe three or four other pages on the website. Most even small agencies are going to charge you at least $1,500 to $3,000 just to build that. But something like this with over 20 web pages across four different domains or subdomains, as well as events, membership, and all of that, I tallied it up. And here's what an agency is going to charge for that. For a low-end local agency or a freelancer to build this website for me, the cost estimate was anywhere from about $7,000 to $12,000. That's just to get like some person to do it for me or a small agency. If I want to use an agency that would be more full service, but they'd still be a smaller local agency, the cost is probably going to be more like 12 to $20,000. and for a big professional agency to build this for me and probably code a lot of it from scratch. 20 to $30,000 and just up from there. And that's just to build it. Then I looked at what it would cost, what most of those people would charge just to host the website and manage it for me. Just basic website management. We're talking about like I need to change the wording on one of the pages. This is what they charge. Freelancers 150 to 250 a month. If it's for a small business website at an agency, they're going to charge $500 to $1,000 a month for this level of website just to maintain it for me and do SEO work. We'll get back to that a little bit later. On top of that, if I need them to do a little bit more work or a little bit more support and they have to put real time into it, the cost for that is usually between $150 to $250 per hour for the work that they do. So, you can see how this adds up. Let me tell you what it costs to build this website myself. There are a few things that go into it. One is hosting the website. Hosting the website, I always use Cloudways. Cloudways is the hosting company I've been with longer than any other hosting company I've ever worked with, and I don't see myself needing to leave, unless they drastically change the way they do things. One of the things I love is how easy it is to scale up. The server that I'm hosting this website on that we're talking about today is a 4 GBTE server uh with a twocore processor. It's on standard. I should upgrade to premium. Um, but I think this one's Digital Ocean server and it's costing me $46 a month to host, but it's got this website and seven others. So, I mean, you could argue I'm paying $46 a month for hosting for this website, but in reality, I'm not. And so, what I was getting at is what I really like is how easy it is if this server gets too small because we're getting tons and tons of traffic or I need to build another website on the server or whatever it may be, it's super easy. It takes a few seconds to just upgrade to the next level server. Whereas most WordPress hosting platforms that I've used, they have these tiers. And when you need to upgrade from one tier to the another, it's such a big jump that it's really hard to make the jump. I pay less to host all my websites on here than I used to pay to host just income school on other hosting platforms. And the hosting that I get, the servers perform better. Anyway, hosting, that's the first cost. And honestly, that's probably the biggest cost at $46 a month, which isn't what you need on a small blog or a personal website. But for a site of this size, a multi-sight with members, and hopefully substantial traffic, I'm going to need a decent size server. I probably could get by with a 2 GB premium server, though. Other costs are going to be a WordPress theme. For this, I'm using Cadence. You could probably get by with the free version, but I use enough premium things that I would probably need to pay at least the basic level, which is $69 a year. I got in early and got a lifetime license for mult for a bunch of websites. I don't have to pay any more to add one more website to this. And that's another thing is if you're building one website, these costs are what I'm telling you. If you need multiple websites, the costs per website go down because a lot of times these licenses apply to multiple websites. So $69 a year for a theme. I'm using three different plugins that help me with membership, payments, and other automations with the website that are all paid plugins. Totaling those up, it's $356 a year. And then email. Typically, email is going to cost me about a dollar a month per email address or $10 a month per email address if I use something like Google Workspace or Microsoft. For this organization, I don't have to pay. We don't have to pay anything because it's a nonprofit organization and Google Workspace will let nonprofits use it for free. So, in total, the cost of this website is $9142 per month. That's my cost. That's a lot better than the $150 to $250 of just basic website cost that any freelancer is going to charge. Not to mention the anywhere from seven to over $30,000 that it could have cost to build it. But that doesn't answer the question, what do you do if you don't know how to do this? Do you just get raked over the coals for thousands and thousands of dollars? You're a small business trying to get going. What are you supposed to do? Well, the reality is is you could learn how to do everything I did to build this website probably within about a week. There are so many different resources available on the web to learn how to do all this stuff. You could learn it all for free. It's going to take you more time though because you're going to have to kind of piece it together. My program, Project 24, it teaches you content creation, blogging content. It teaches you uh video content, YouTube, uh that platform, and other social media. But also within Project 24, now we have a course for small businesses and their websites that walks you through literally setting up your website, building it out, designing it, using all of the tools. And then once you built the website, it walks you through your Google My Business listing, how to create that and set that up and integrate it with your website and everything else. And it teaches you how to use social media, does email marketing, all the things that you need as a business to be able to create your own website and support that website and then do your own SEO. It teaches you that and it walks you through step by step by step how to do that. You could get through all that or you could have an employee on your team get through all of that and have at least a basic website set up for you in about a week. Now, the next concern trying to do it yourself is as I'm trying to figure out this process, what happens if you get stuck and you're on your own and you don't have a professional to reach out to? The best thing that we can offer you that we've been able to provide for so many people is a strong community of support. So, as a member of Project 24, we have access to a a big community of people who have all been working through this process and many are further along. I'm in that community as well. And whenever somebody has any sort of issue either with content, they're stuck with anything or they're just stuck with their website. We're all there for each other. You ask the question and somebody has been there before. Probably most of us have encountered a lot of the same issues. In fact, most of the issues that we encounter are issues that so many people run into that we've already kind of overcome that with the training content, the video content that walks you through the step by step by-step method because we've encountered those same issues over and over again. We preemptively answer those questions for you. But then what happens? You build a website, you make it look great, the design's nice, all of that stuff, right? But now you need it to rank, right? You need people to find your business. There are a lot of agencies out there that for $500 to $20,000 a month will do SEO for your agency. Most of those organizations are just doing a few little things that we will teach you exactly how to do in this small business course. In fact, we're going to teach you how to do it better than they do it because an agency is not going to be able to do as good a job of many of the things you need to do than you're going to be able to do yourself. And that is like the content piece and the social media piece and the local stuff, right? Most of what they're going to do is they're going to optimize your Google business listing and they're going to run some campaigns to try to get you more reviews on your Google business listing. And we're going to show you exactly how to do all of that yourself and all of the other things that make a much bigger difference in SEO. A while back, I was talking to a physical therapist who actually came across our content on YouTube just using the free content that we have here on income school. He started writing some content for his website and immediately it started ranking for a lot of local searches related to physical therapy. In fact, it ranked number one. He also found that the highest ranking physical therapist in the area, his website was outdated. The information on his website was outdated. It didn't look good. And he couldn't understand why it ranked so well. In fact, even the number of Google reviews wasn't that out of line with what he already had. But what this other person had was years worth of content that they had created on their website. And that made all the difference. And as this physical therapist started adding content to their own website, they got it to rank very quickly. And that helped boost their listing so they start showing up for way more local searches. And that is the name of the game for a lot of businesses. SEO is not complicated, but agencies are able to charge a lot because most people feel like there's some secret to getting to the top and they don't know that secret and so they have to pay to play. You don't. Just let me tell you the secrets. It's pretty simple. I've already spilled several of them here in this video. So, in summary, you can pay an agency to build your website for you. Depending on how simple it is, it could be as little as $1,500. But if it's a $1,500 website, then it's a website that you could probably build in an afternoon once you learn the things that I have to teach you and the things that we talk about here on this channel. But if you need something a little bit more complex, you need to be able to do e-commerce through your website, that kind of stuff, you can be prepared to pay an agency easily up to $30,000. The question is, is it worth it to you to pay that much? And is it worth it to pay hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands of dollars every month from now forever to get somebody to maintain that for you? Or is it better for you to have yourself or somebody on your team learn these skills over the course of probably a few weeks to months, but then to be able to build your website for you and then be able to manage and maintain that website at a fraction of that cost? If that's the case, I encourage you to check out Project 24. And when you go to set up your website, we're going to show you exactly how to do it step by step by step. We're going to show you how to do it on Cloudways because Cloudways is the only hosting provider that I recommend for especially WordPressbased websites. So, I encourage you to check it out. Go watch some other videos and see just how simple it is to build a website. I want you to feel encouraged whether you join Project 24 or not. I want you to feel encouraged and and empowered and know that you can do this. And in the age today of AI, in fact, in our video last week, I'll put it right here so you can see it. Um, I showed exactly how to set up your WordPress hosting and how you could use AI to guide you through the whole process. You can use that exact same process to do every aspect of building your website. You have a question, ask an AI and it's going to be able to guide you through step by step by step exactly what to do. So, start with that if nothing else. And if you need help, check us out here in Project 24. We'll see you all in our next