April 17, 2020
OMG! My Website’s Going To Cost WHAT?! Why websites can vary in cost.
We don’t get this question asked directly very often, however we are sure it is something which is thought about by business owners a LOT.
Let’s set the scene. You book in for a consultation with a web designer. You give them a list of what you want for your brand new, slick website, taking inspiration from the 1000’s of websites you have witnessed over several years. You leave feeling happy and optimistic having discussed the content, number of pages and your competition.
DING - the email arrives from the agency and you eagerly open it up and then click through to the quote. Your eye jumps straight to the bottom of the page, you see the $$ and you board the train to Heart Attack Central.
Let’s run through a few reasons why and hopefully save you some money next time you are in the market for a great website.
Did you ask for a heap of pages? Could your stand-alone testimonials page be amortised into the “team” page? Did you have 3 pages on your family history that would be a nice thing to have, but won’t necessarily sell any products or build credibility that a single page can’t achieve? Did you require a lot of custom features which aren’t really available “off the shelf” and will take several hours to build? See where we’re going with this?! Whilst it’s awesome to have a 20 page website that gives potential clients all the information needed, sometimes the budget doesn’t allow this. Maybe the 3 pages for item “a” and the 4 pages for items “b & c” could be built as stage 2 when budget is available?
The super cool feature you saw on that large corporations, retail giant or national franchise’s website probably wasn’t built in an hour. Or even 20 hours. It may have taken a team several days to achieve with the direction of a marketing manager and team of marketing professionals. Unless you have a huge budget, or enough work to put a web designer on full time, those custom features (aka, the bells and whistles) take time and cost money.
Remember when you only needed a website that worked on a desktop computer? Then it had to be desktop and mobile. Now, with all the devices such as tables, mobiles, laptops and desktops, you need to have a responsive website, or Google penalises you. And you guessed it, responsive websites take a lot longer to build. Why? Because a general site has at least 3 things called “breakpoints”. Each breakpoint is setup for different screen sizes such as desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. Grab the edge of your web browser and resize it so its narrow and then wide. See how all of the elements shuffle around with some changing size and some dropping off all together? This is what responsive sites do. They resize to the infinite number of displays, devices and browser sizes people use. Oh yeah, and they don’t do that automatically. Your web designer needs to design each page as 3 or more different sizes and then ensure it works in a variety of browsers.
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