Right Mind Creative

Often when talking with a new client about a website, the first question we are always asked is “how much is a website going to cost me?” There is no easy answer; obviously a brochure style website consisting of only a few pages is going to be a lot less than a site with a store and payment gateway. While I can’t tell you how much your website will cost without first learning about your company and your goals, I can offer some advise to let you know you are getting what you are paying for.

Where is your money going?

The success of a website as a vehicle for connecting business with customers is the result of several stages and disciplines coming together and working as a whole.

Research

For your website to be successful, the designers have to get to know you, your company, your goals, your competition, and most importantly, your target audience. If a web designer doesn’t have a thorough understanding of the needs of your business, your website will not be working its hardest for you. You should expect to spend some time answering questions and helping the designer see your company from your point of view, and most importantly, your customer’s point of view.

Design

What has been learned from the research will directly affect the outcome of the design phase. If the proper research hasn’t been done, no matter how flashy and eye-catching the design is, it will fail to represent your company accurately and make the conversion from visitor to customer. During this phase design compositions will go back and forth from designer to client as the final details are worked out. As this is the face of the site to your customers it goes without saying the importance of the design and layout is paramount. The site must be unique enough to separate itself from the competition without being obnoxious while retaining usability for your visitors.

Assets

Not all websites will need additional assets like photography, writing, or special software, but those that do can expect to pay for the required material. This may be a single stock photo or a session with a professional photographer. The impact a professional photographer or writer can have on the content and appeal to your website is tremendous, and there is a huge difference in an educated, experienced professional and an assuming amateur.

Coding

Behind every website are lines and lines of code that make up the structure and content of the site. This is an area that often gets neglected. Typically clients don’t understand the code that makes up their site and are unable to spot the difference between good and bad. Extra care must be taken to write clean, standards compliant, semantic code. Search engines like Google use the code your site is built on to rank the website and present it as a result of a search. Having accessible code means search engines will have an easier time finding your site and in turn your site will see more traffic. This is one element of SEO (search engine optimization) which design and marketing agencies sometimes sell as an additional service. Properly written code also ensures your website will look the same across different kinds of computers and will look the same in the future as new technologies are developed.

Special Feature Development

From experience we know that the solution for one project, although similar, unlikely meets the specific needs of the next project. The time saved using templates is often made up in having to realign special features from client to client. Some examples of what might fall into the category of a special feature are dealer locators and custom Google maps, member registration and management, shopping carts and stores, events listings and calendars, content organization by categories and tags, and special photo galleries. These often take a little more time to develop and test to ensure they are functioning as expected.

Hosting and Domain

Hosting is the space your website takes up on a computer and is served on the internet. A domain is the www.yourwebsite.com address. Domains and hosting are often purchased together for one, two, or three years at a time. Typically these are relatively inexpensive, depending on the needs of your website you can expect $100 to $200 per year, or less if you decide to purchase three years up front.

Implementation

Putting the website up, live on the internet is often the last stage of the process. This involves configuring the server which your new website will be living on to best serve your custom site, as well as moving your new website from its testing server to its final home. It may also be necessary to move or set-up new email addresses. If you already have a hosted website it is likely that your new site up without any interruption in service.

Training

Paying your web designer every time you wish to update content on your site has become a thing of the past for most design agencies. To date all the websites we have built put control of the content into the hands of the owner. Most internet savvy people have no problem learning how to maintain their website, as it is incredibly easy. However, some sites with advanced features may require some one on one training. Most training is brief, and in most cases it is best for one person to be in charge of the site’s content in the interest of continuity.

Some things to look out for…

Over the years we have been involved in many levels of the web industry, and we have seen some practices which we believe are unfair.

The “Package Deal”

The package deal is an all-inclusive website. Often you will see these advertised as “Get a complete website for $500″. While most design agencies do assume you are looking for a complete package, this particular package deal often includes things like a set number of pages designed, a specific set of features and a set number of email addresses. Whether a site has 1 or 100 pages often does not require endless hours of design and layout time as you would be led to believe. These packages are often focused on quantity over quality and fail to meet the goals of most businesses.

Billed by the Hour

Being billed by the hour does not make sense for a large project such as a website. If you are paying by the hour and you have hired a poor web designer you will be paying a lot more for an inferior product.

Micro Features

Micro features are our favorite indicator you are getting ripped off. It frustrates me to no end when I hear of someone paying a couple of dollars here and a couple of dollars there to include such minuscule (and often unnecessary) add-ons. Some examples of micro features are “Bookmark Me” buttons or links, the current date and time in the website header, current weather information and images that fade in and out. The best feature I have seen to date is the ability to have unlimited pages on your site (for an additional fee of course). The truth is there is nothing limiting the number of pages that a website can be made up of, and the majority of these little features are simply copied and pasted from one template to another.

In conclusion…

As you can see, there are many factors that go into the price of a website, and choosing a web designer that is dedicated to helping your business reach its goals is important. Right Mind Creative prides itself on a honest approach to all the work we do, without cutting corners or using templates, and a one on one relationship with each of our clients.

So how much will a website cost? Contact us to find out.