Paid Or Free Domain For Corporate Website?

[bingbongbangbung]

I had a meeting with a university that wanted to know more about my startup, and they asked for a corporate website which I didn't have because I'm still seed stage and pre-revenue. I did consider setting up a corporate website before, but was too lazy since they're usually either blogs or e-commerce platforms. But now I guess I'm incenitivized to have one for legitimacy and to redirect third parties, so I don't need to keep explaining what my startup does or at least will intend to do.

I do recall having a WordPress account and a personal blog, and I think out of laziness and convenience I can just go for that or maybe consider Shopify. For WordPress, I can start out with a free domain and then later upgrade to paid and let them host it. I ain't gonna code a corporate website from scratch because it's less labour intensive to build a blog with no-code solutions, whereas for e-commerce too complex to build myself when Shopify is a thing. I just don't wanna keep on paying a monthly nor yearly fee just to keep the rights to the domain right now.

Free - WordPress

Paid - WordPress

Paid - Shopify

Free - Other

Paid - Other

[Vevv123]

I’d say free for now, you can always shorten the url with bitly. I believe you can also customize the bitly link so it’s branded. Another thing is you can make business cards and do a QR code with the website url that way they never know that it’s not a paid website because they will just scan it.

[bingbongbangbung]

They'll know it's free domain when they see the URL in the browser

[Vevv123]

Ok I mean since it is a university I think it might be worth paying for the website. I just saw it’s a university and when it comes to an academic institution I think they do pay attention to those kinds of details.

[bingbongbangbung]

Well it doesn't really matter because I'd switch to paid later on; I could've had a corporate website over a year ago, but I was too lazy and had other priorities like building up the MVP