If you’ve ever built or gotten quotations for a website you’ll have learned that website costs can vary a lot! Why are the prices so different and how do you decide what’s appropriate to spend on a website for your business?
Well, there’s a few factors that can determine how much a website could or should cost. The first of these is largely decided by your budget.
Deciding how much you’re willing to invest in your website is not an easy process. I’ve had some clients that initially went with a free or supercheap website solution (less than $500-$1000), but in many cases they find out the hard way that you get what you pay for. The websites either didn’t stack up to expectations or they didn’t perform, and that’s why many of them are now Businessary clients. Yes, they end up paying twice for a website, but the second time they get what they wanted initially – a good looking, user friendly website that helps drive their business growth.
So when you decide a budget, we would encourage you to think of your website and digital marketing presence as an investment in the future and growth of your business. Whether you want to grow your client numbers or increase the value of your business for eventual sale, you’ll get a good return on your investment with a good website.
Another consideration is how much of your own time you’re willing to invest in a website. People who want to spend less on a website often underestimate how much of their time will be spent writing copy for the website and finding and purchasing the right stock images (or commissioning their own images) and writing some draft client testimonials for approval, etc… Is your time best spent doing this or is it best spent with your existing clients or cultivating new ones?
For those who are considering opting for someone to create your new website, we’ve broken down the steps of building a website with some average costs associated with each step. One important thing to note with these costs though is that they’re ballpark-only. We tailor our solutions for each individual client. In some cases this may mean changing the structure of their digital marketing package, or perhaps phasing elements of the website to spread the cost out (i.e. starting with a very basic website and adding a blog later in the year or dipping your toes into social media before committing to a whole rollout). So even if your budget is below this, it’s worth having a chat to see what other options might best suit you or your business.
Your website costs will depend on what design elements and website functionality is required. Other cost impacts could include 3rd party integration, and the amount of pages or products required. Our websites include the cost of copywriting and image sourcing, as well as five basic tabs/pages, but some providers may charge separately for these.
To understand what the costs will be and what you’re prepared to do you need to first plan for your website and understand what the purpose will be. Without this step you’ll have little chance of getting the result you want (but you may still be paying top dollar!).
There are a few components involved in building a website, and they’re generally broken into the following areas:
Be realistic about your site (it’s unlikely to be #1 on Google magically after you launch it) and what you hope to achieve. It varies business to business but it’s important to agree what ‘success’ will look like so you can measure how your website is performing.
In-house – $0
Employing someone to build your digital strategy – $500 – $5000
Businessary – $1,500 – $3,000
What would you like people to do once they land on your website? If you’re not sure, enlist the help of your team and observe your own internet searching behaviours for a few days to help give you an idea. Perhaps you have some trusted clients that you could speak to about what would be helpful for them on your website. Research similar businesses to yours that have a website that you like. Write down what you like about other websites and why – this will help guide you towards what is important to you and how to prioritise.
In most cases when people are searching and clicking on a website it’s to do one more or of these things:
Understanding what people expect to find on your website will help you make sure you’ve got the right buttons/forms/information/links to engage with them. The number one goal of a lot of my clients is to get the contact details of their visitors so they can follow up.
Identifying your calls to action in-house costs $0
Employing a company including market research, surveys and engaging focus groups $2.5k – 20K
Businessary – this is included in our digital marketing packages (on average $3k-$5k)
It’s important to decide the structure of your website (how many pages do you need, will there be sub pages and forms required? Do you have other collateral such as videos, images or documents that will need a logical place to live?) before you begin building it. Doing this step as a team or collaboratively can be beneficial as it’s surprisingly easy to miss something obvious! Once you set the structure you could also look to divvy up the more detailed work of what goes on each page.
Organising your own content in-house costs $0
Employing a company to write and create content including sourcing images, $2.5K – $20K
Businessary – this is included in our digital marketing packages (on average $3k-$5k)
The look and feel of the website (or interface and user experience) is one of the most important elements of your website. It can, done correctly, increase your enquiries and sales. One of the most important factors in the look and feel of your website is mobility. It’s no longer an optional ‘nice to have’ functionality of your website. Google will actually now ‘punish’ your website in its rankings if it’s not optimised for mobile devices.
Your website needs to be responsive in design and user-friendliness on mobile devices. Is it easy to navigate using the mobile version of your menu? Easy to scroll? Are your buttons big enough and forms simple enough to allow people to fill them out while they are on the go? Mobile usage is likely to only increase so this area is worth spending due time and consideration on.
Create your own design or buy a template in-house costs $0
Use a pre existing theme – $0 – $3000
Employing a web design company to custom design the look, $3K – $20K
Businessary – this is included in our digital marketing packages (on average $3k-$5k)
Click here to view sample websites or current client sites we have completed.
Now it’s time to actually build your website (or integrate the design you’ve created into your content management system (CMS/self-managed website). Businessary does this step for you if you have signed up for one of our packages (including instruction on how to update the content yourself if you plan on publishing content regularly in the future). Usually if we’ve done the first four steps correctly, we can create the majority of your draft website in the first go (we’d expect you to be happy with around 80-90% of the website).
Things that can help or hinder this process:
Populating your own content $0
Employing a web design company to create a fully functional website, $1.5K – $20K
Employing a web design company to populate all your content. $1.5K – 10K
Businessary – this is included in our digital marketing packages (on average $3k-$5k)
Generally this refers to using keywords and keyword phrases in the pages of your website that helps to increase your organic (free) listing in Google. You can get an agency to look after this for you, or if you have a fairly current content management system you should be able to manage it yourself as well.
Here’s some of the key areas to ensure you have used good keywords/meta tags:
Doing your own on-page SEO $0
Employing a web design company to optimise each page, $500 – $2.5K
Businessary – $1k-$5k depending on page number and selected directories
This refers to techniques that can be used to improve the position of a web site in the search engine results page (SERPs). This would include PPC advertising, content creation, links back to your site and social media to name a few.
The cost factor here can change immensely depending on what platforms and approach you decide to use. Again you can take control of this yourself to save money but be aware there are pitfalls and there will be a steep learning curve required. There is plenty of information available through places like Google AdWords (which also has a free phone number to ring for support) if you would like to be a self taught SEM expert.
Doing your own off-page SEO/SEM – this can vary from free (if you just use free options like social media) to thousands depending on your PPC budget
Employing an agency – generally an agency will charge a monthly management fee, from $500 – $2.5K + the cost of the campaign.
Businessary – monthly management fee of $100-500 depending on size of campaign + advertising cost of the campaign.
All sites need to be hosted somewhere, and be securely sitting either in the cloud or on a server in a high end data center with clear back up and disaster recovery/business continuity protocols in place.
A good hosting service will:
Hosting – $20pm to $10K+pm
Businessary – $15pm
Ongoing support is important for business and websites, you never know when you will need help. Whether it is about the hosting, domains or the website it is advised to have some level of support that you can trust. If your site goes down you need to know that it is being look into and it will be back live as soon as possible. A professional web company should take care of all this for you saving you time and stress. It is important though to understand the difference between support and paid work. Support is about making sure the website and hosting platform is functioning properly. If you require someone to add more pages or new functionality then this may come under extras and paid work.
Ongoing support – once you go live with a website you can’t just ‘set it and forget it’. You’ll need the peace of mind that your website and hosting platform is functioning properly. And in order to truly deliver for your business you need to keep the website up to date and fresh with content. It should be a living, breathing thing. The good news is that if this isn’t your strength you can outsource this task and there are a range of services scalable to your budget.
Support – 0 to $1000+pm
Businessary – site functionality and technical support is included free with your hosting, new functionality and pages may incur an extra cost.
Whichever options you choose, it’s important to get the right outcome at a reasonable budget for your business. Businessary would be happy to talk you through our process so you can make an informed decision. We want you to get a website that works for you at a price you can afford!
Source: comparative pricing based on this blog.