Why Does a Website Cost So Much?
Almost everyone has seen a site go up in a matter of days and it may look pretty nice, and you may be wondering, why does a website costs so much? Our question to you is, why do you want a website? Most respond that they want to make a profit from it or gain a large audience from it. To accomplish that, more will go into that than just a few images and a template.
We go thru a discovery phase of learning about you, your business and your goals. Then we have meetings to identify what you’re doing well and what you’d like to do better and along the way, we may uncover ways to save you money by creating an online process. For example, during a recent conversation with my client, she was describing how her assistant spends 25% of her time setting up appointments. We came up with a solution where we added an online appointment scheduler that automatically updated her calendar and provided email alerts to her and her customers. This not only saved her time but help her customers as well.
Back to why the high website cost? Well, a lot of time is spent on preparation, how are you going to build your site may depend on your current budget and what you intend to do in the future. If every customer came to us with a prepared logo in multiple sizes, content, menu structure and perfectly suited and sized images. I guarantee their cost will be low. But that has never happened, in fact, the opposite is the norm. Most clients are not technically savvy and don’t understand what’s involved in creating a productive site and that’s okay – that’s why we’re in business. Most clients just want to run their business and don’t need the headache of learning code or the back end of their site to make an update.
If you choose a system such as wix.com your growth is limited and your content is a constraint to them. Also, you won’t have the luxury of adding your scripts. What are scripts? Scripts are small coding language that tells the system what to do. In other words, I can customize your site using scripts.
Okay, I’m only getting started, there are the details and yes the devil is in the details. Here is a list of tasks that absolutely need to get done in development such as:
- setup Google analytics
- setup webmaster tools
- create a sitemap for various search engines,
- browser testing,
- customizations,
- add page copy,
- add keywords,
- add meta data to all pages,
- connect social media links and feeds
- enter details of products (size, descriptions, price, etc),
- connect with their payment gateway,
- add shipping functionality,
- find photos,
- customize or resize those photos,
- add their videos,
- create auto response emails,
- test those emails,
- setting up their employee list of emails,
- providing them with written instructions for their email editor,
- create a marketing template,
- final Q & A, DNS switch before launch
- and post launch updates.
After launch, as part of our process, we allocate time spent educating and training our site owner or employees on how to make updates to their sites.
Websites can differ as to how long they take to complete, some are brand new; others are redesigned and they all vary in sizes. So the completion of a site can vary from one month (very small) to 3 or 4 months and may have on-going daily or weekly updates depending on the needs of the client.
If you were to hire a web designer today it can cost you about $45,000 to $75,000 per year depending on where you live in the country. We offer not only web design, but SEO optimization, SEM Marketing and Website Maintenance. We are half the cost of an in house employee and you don’t need to buy us a laptop, software, nor provide us with office space. Give us a call 1-800-292-1942 or send us an email and allow us the opportunity to save you thousands of dollars.
