how do i make a website? the honest answer, with the three ways and the real costs

web · Oct 7, 2026 · 5 min read

the question "how do i make a website" hides a second question, and it is almost never about technology. it is: "how do i do this without being taken advantage of, without wasting a month, and without discovering in six months that i built the wrong thing?"

that fear is reasonable. this industry runs on the gap between what you know and what the person in front of you knows, and the fastest way to be taken advantage of is to start shopping before you know what you are buying. so before the three ways, the one thing that matters more than any platform.

the decision that makes all the other decisions cheap

who is the website for, and what should that person do when they arrive?

not "what should it look like". not "which builder". a website is a place with a job. a restaurant site's job is "make the menu findable and the reservation obvious". a consultant's site's job is "make the first email feel safe to send". a shop's job is "show what is in stock and take the money". when you know the job, every later decision gets cheaper: the platform, the number of pages, the budget, even the words.

when you do not know the job, every option looks plausible and every quote looks either too cheap or too expensive, because you have nothing to measure either one against. this is why two people can get wildly different quotes for "the same site" and both quotes can be correct.

the three real ways

everything else is marketing. there are three ways to get a website, and they differ in what they cost and what they ask of you.

  • a builder (wix, squarespace, webflow, shopify). you pay a subscription, pick a template, pour your content in. roughly 0-300 euro a year if you are on your own, and you can be live in a weekend. what you are buying is speed. what you are giving up is control: generic layout, urls that follow the builder's structure, load times that depend on the plan you are on, and a site that is hard to leave once it holds all your content.
  • a template plus a little help. you buy a theme (30-60 euro), maybe a freelance designer to adjust colors and a few sections, and you end up around 300-1000 euro. you are buying time and a base that looks finished. it is still not designed for you. it was designed for a category of you.
  • a person. a freelance or small studio: 1500-5000 euro for a showcase site done with care. an agency: 5000-20000+ euro for bigger, structured work. here you are not buying a template or a subscription. you are buying the questions a good professional asks before quoting anything: who are your clients, what do they need to find, what should they do when they arrive.

i checked those numbers against live sources and wrote the full breakdown, including the maintenance costs most quotes leave out, in quanto costa un sito web. read that one before you read another quote. the ranges above are the summary. the reasoning is the post.

what none of the three ways does for you

the words. every way to build a website eventually sits you in front of a text field and asks: what does your business do, for whom, and why you? this is where do-it-yourself projects stall for weeks, and it is also where cheap websites fail hardest, because a template with vague copy is a billboard with no message on it.

if you get stuck, do not start with the design. start with one sentence: "i help [who] do [what] so that [result]". every page, photo and button either supports that sentence or is decoration.

how long it actually takes

a one-page site on a builder: a weekend, if the words already exist. a small done-with-care site from a freelance: 3-6 weeks including content and revisions. an agency project: 10-20 weeks, because the process includes research, structure, content and testing, not just screens. if someone promises you a serious custom site in three days, they are selling you the template option at a person price.

FAQ: the questions i actually get

can i make one for free?

yes, on a builder's free plan. the trade is real: builder branding on your url, ads on some tiers, the same generic structure, and a domain you do not own. free is a fine way to learn an editor. it is a bad place to keep a business.

can ai build it for me?

ai will write plausible copy and generate a layout, and the result reads like a thousand other sites, because it is trained on a thousand other sites. i wrote what i actually think about building with ai in my take on ai. short version: it is a fast first draft, and a first draft still needs someone who knows what the site is for.

should i learn to code instead?

only if you want to learn to code. making a website and learning web development are two different projects, and confusing them is how websites end up unfinished.

what is the minimum i can get away with?

one page that says what you do, shows proof (photos, work, reviews), and makes contacting you unavoidable. add pages only when each one earns its keep.

the part that is actually about you

the technical choice matters less than you fear, and the choice of what to say matters more than you expect. a builder with sharp words beats a custom site with vague ones, every time, on every metric that pays anyone's rent.

so: decide the job, pick the cheapest way that can genuinely do the job, write the one sentence, and ship it small. a website you can change is worth more than a website that is perfect. perfect takes ten weeks. changeable takes a weekend.

if you are near Parma or Emilia-Romagna and want the "person" way — someone who asks those questions before quoting — that is what i do:

if you are not near Parma, the ranges above are still real. use them, and be suspicious of whoever quotes you without asking you anything first.