E-commerce sites are an excellent way to sell your products and/or services online whilst staying independent of large companies like Amazon and eBay. Simply put, an e-commerce site allows you to sell your products and/or services to customers by displaying your catalogue and taking payments online.

There are a growing number of ways to take payment electronically, though integrating them into a professional website can be tricky. In order to solve this issue, a number of developers have rolled out plug-ins and services to allow you to sell online.

However, most of these services require you to pay a one-off fee or monthly subscription for the software, which can make starting an e-commerce site daunting. For example, WooCommerce (a WordPress plugin) charges £150+ for features like subscriptions and bookings, while Shopify charges £22 a month for their most basic plan.

While Shopify is easy to implement (being a hosted solution) and WooCommerce is highly customisable (with enough money and technical skills), you’ll probably be better off with a professionally made, bespoke solution.

One of the fastest-growing type of sites are content-heavy sites, often presented as blogs. These sites generally update regularly with content such as articles, guides and creative work. Many businesses use blog sites to market their products and/or services, driving brand engagement with helpful advice and thought-provoking articles.

While content-oriented sites are often quite easy to set-up (especially if most of your content is in text format), they require constant work to remain current. After all, people will lose interest in your content if you don’t make anything new for months on end.

So, if you’re willing to take a more active role in your business’ online presence, or have viewpoints and content that you’re more than willing to share with the world, a content-focussed website could be perfect for you! Furthermore, if your customers engage with the posted content, then you’ll be able to increase brand engagement and interest with far less expended money and effort than a traditional marketing campaign.

One of the most common ways of creating a content-oriented site is with WordPress, which is primarily aimed towards text-heavy blogging sites. However, creating a functional and professional site can be difficult if you’re inexperienced with web developing in general and WordPress in particular.