What is the investment for a website?

Here we are for another Avidmode Chat blog. This is an edited transcript of part of the session that we did a couple of weeks ago on what investment for a website looks like. If you want to watch the discussion in full, see the video above – otherwise read our thoughts in the blog post below. It’s likely this will be a two part blog, there was so much ground to cover!

So, how much it does it cost to get a website built?

It’s the most popular question that we get from potential and it’s pretty difficult to answer – but we’re going to try so strap in.

Expectations and Pricing

Clients need to be clear about what their goals are before you can even answer that question. We’ve had a lot of unhappy website clients come to us from where they’ve had their initial website built for £500, then they’re upset three years later because the website’s not doing anything. Essentially, it’s likely that you’ve bought a website that is like your business card. It’s your home on the web. It’s a shop window for you, but it’s not going to do anything else.

In addiditon to that the client probably hasn’t been maintaining it. They’ve probably only blogged a couple of time. It’s most likely not got the SEO elements on it. It probably hasn’t been built for conversion. We’re going to be a bit controversial here and say that’s not the original web development company’s problem, it’s a problem with misunderstanding.

Understanding What You Are Getting

Websites aren’t a one size fits all solution, unless you are paying a higher price, you can’t expect a website to work for you three, five or ten years after you start up. Your designer/developer will be building you a website that works for you, right now – something that shows off who you are, but it’s not going to position you in a wrong way. This is especially important if you’re a new business getting off the ground, you’re target market will be becoming clearer, you might be fitting yourself into a smaller niche, in some case you might even change what you’re doing entirely.

Take Avidmode as an example of this, when Kittie started up back in the day – she was working as a freelance writer in a number of sectors, she was also doing some VA type work but it was mostly copywriting for blogs, websites and article platforms. The business had a different name, a different target audience, a different everything. As the market changed, Kittie pivoted the business, learned new skills in Web Design and Marketing that complemented her background in Business Strategy and Writing, Avidmode was born. The website for the original business was rebuilt to reflect the changes.

You might start with a small website, but you have to evolve it. It’s never static, it tracks the progress of your business.

What Will A Lower Price Get You?

If you’ve done a little bit of research on website and prices of websites, you might have noticed that there are lots of low cost options out there. Some will create websites on an hourly basis, others set a package price sub £200.

Those low cost websites when someone is charging a lower price is more likely to be something like a brochure website because there’s less time invested in it. The only time where that isn’t the case is where you’ve got a graduate or someone trying to build their portfolio, this doesn’t neccesarily meant that you’re going to get a bad website but having practical experience in user experience, content and conversion rate optimization are two different things. So I wouldn’t expect to pay the price for somebody who’s been doing it 15 years as somebody coming out of there final year of university.

It’s important to get a good understanding of who you’re working with and what they can bring to the table for you and your business. It’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of having a beautiful website that just doesn’t work, we hear this all the time.

Why Are Website Costs High?

The more detailed or complex a website the higher the price will be – if you want a website that works as a memebership site, if you want booking systems, if you want the specific bespoke design elements. All of these things take quite a bit of time to develop

So for instance, Daniel at the moment is working on developing a booking system from scratch. He is now 260 hours into that project, at £120 ph. So if you wanted to buy that, you’d have to be a very large organization, which is why we do it as a plugin and you just license it annually from us. From the users perspective, the booking system looks simple and you wouldn’t guess that it had over 200 hours worth of work gone into it.

This is the main reason that website prices tend to be quite high, we don’t price on an hourly basis for our own websites but we do factor in the time and effort that we think a project might need. The example above can be extrapolated to so many aspects of a website, for example – each website that we build has consideration time for the wireframing and customer journey, when a client gets a look at the final product, this isn’t something that you’d automatically notice, but it’s there and will help with conversion once your website is launched.

Questions To Ask Before You Start Building Your Website?

We want to leave you with a list of questions that you can ask yourself and your website agency to gain more understanding on what you’ll be getting for your investment.

• What do I want the website to be able to do?
• Will the website be helping me reach new audiences?
• Does the website need to have certain functionalities (booking, payments, animation etc)?
• Where am I in my business journey, do I need a website with all the bells and whistles yet?
• Is my business likely to drastically change in the next two years?
• What is included in the cost of the website?
• What type of maintainence will the website need and who will be doing it?
• When do I need to review my website to check that it’s doing what it should be?
• Do I have a clear goal in mind for where I want the business to be in 3, 5, 10 years, how will these goals impact the current website that I have?

We hoped this helped clear up some of the ideas around investment for a website. We’ll probably do a two part for this as there we loads more to say so keep your eyes peeled for that. If you are wondering about how much your own website might cost, give us a shout and we’ll be happy to get you over some details.

If you’re just starting up then a starter website might be exactly what you’re looking for. We offer brochure, starter websites from £750 – and as we discussed in the post, this website won’t do everything for you but it’ll be suitable for a new business who’s ready to show themselves off online!

You can chat to us more about this by sending us a message to hello@sero.digital or on any of our social media channels.

Other posts from our Avidmode Chats series that you might like:

Ethical Website Design and Dark Patterns
Should You Use Video On Your Website?
Eurovision, Politics and Marketing – Speak Your Mind Or Not?