Website Design Fees: Cutting Corners Cost-Wise Can Cost You More!

Cheap Website Design Can Turn Around & Bite You!

My business partner Damian and I recently completed a beautiful new and properly search engine optimized website for another newcomer to the world of online marketing. Now my client, whom I’ll refer to as “Jennie”, can start to really grow her work-at-home business.

I am always enthusiastic when I bring a new client on board, especially one who has never marketed their products or services online before. I know how excited I was the first time I viewed my first website on the World Wide Web! It was an awesome experience. I enjoy sharing in that same excitement with my clients when they finally see their website uploaded and live on the internet.

But there’s more to this post than me gushing over how great I feel at delivering yet another properly designed and optimized site, and how happy my client is with her new website design.

It Didn’t Start Out All Rosy and Wonderful for Her

Jennie was referred to me about eight months ago by another very satisfied client. She and I talked about what was entailed to get a new website up and running; what it would take to get good rankings in the search engines; what she needed to know about maintaining the website; and of course, how much the website design and search engine optimization services would cost her.

I gladly offer a complimentary 30-minute consultation to prospective clients. I make a quick assessment of your website’s design and search engine optimization status, and discuss what is involved to get your website up and running properly.

Damian and I are very fair and quite reasonable in our design and SEO fees. We pride ourselves on over delivering all aspects of our services. In our minds, we proposed a very fair price to Jennie for a “simple” yet user friendly and 100% SEO friendly website design.

“OK, Claudia … Let Me Think About That …”

If someone has never had a website before, and really has not done much investigation into the price points and fees that are being quoted for web design and SEO services, it is obviously quite hard then for a newcomer to know what is a “fair” price quote and what isn’t.

Unfortunately, apples do not get compared to apples … too often shiny crisp apples get compared to rotting oranges. In other words … if I quote you $1000.00 for a custom website design, which happens to also include custom header graphics; some special scripts needed in order that it performs as you wish; and keyword research has been performed and all your tags have been professionally written and properly optimized; and of course there are many many more hours of hand holding and such involved before your new site finally goes live … but you find “someone who says they are really good at HTML coding” who can build you a website for $200.00 … and you JUMP at the $200.00 “deal” … what do you think you will end up with?

Hmmm??

Yup, You Will 99.99% Most Assuredly End Up With a Mess!

You guessed it. Because Jennie had no clue as to what constitutes a solid, properly designed, properly coded, properly SEO’d and technically sound site, yes … she thought the price we quoted her was maybe “more than she needed to spend” (her words). Please note the price we quoted her happened to be less than my $1000.00 example.

So she thought “well gee … it’s just a website … $200.00 sounds fair to me”. And off she went and plunked down her $200.00 with that “really good HTML coder”.

But (and this is true my friends, I am NOT making this up) oh my! What she ended up with! That “HTML expert” used FrontPage to design the site. Mistake #1! Anybody involved in website design ought to know that FrontPage has been obsolete for a good while. And quite honestly, anyone who understands HTML knows that FrontPage adds a lot of code bloat, among other things.

In addition, the “design” of the site (if you can call it that) was tired looking. Maybe OK for 1999, but not up to today’s tough standards. If you’re going to pay for a brand spanking new site, then please … at least make sure design-wise you are getting something that reflects current web design trends. Why start out looking dated?

So, to make a long story short, I received an email from Jennie a few weeks ago. Her first words were “I should have listened to you to begin with …”. And she was saying, “Please Claudia, how much will you charge to clean up this mess and get me online with a website?” She provided the URL to her “new” site in the email.

After one look, it was clear there wasn’t going to be any “cleaning up”! That website was a design disgrace. No ethical SEO consultant would even think of optimizing a site like that, either. That would be stealing money from the client.

First things first was to design her a technically correct website and one that was also properly SEO’d. I told her if she was willing this time to do it right, and spend the money necessary to start out on the right foot … then we’d be more than happy to take her on as a client. She agreed.

And remember folks, you are also paying for the knowledge and expertise the web designer or SEO consultant brings to the table! That is worth a whole lot to the ultimate success of your website project, too.

Moral of the story … you usually DO get exactly what you pay for! As I told Jennie, “I guess you can look at that $200.00 as a valuable learning curve and maybe if nothing else, it did get you motivated to write the content for your web pages!”

Why Pay For A Custom Website Design?

What’s So Bad About Using a DIY Sitebuilder?

There is no getting around the fact that we are in a very fast moving age of internet technology. This includes the way websites are evolving and the level of interaction between the sites and their visitors. There are so many more things that a website can “do” now, as compared to even a few years ago.

As things started getting more technical as far as building a website is concerned, a lot of pre-built scripts started being offered. These scripts are better known as “site builders”. Companies like Yahoo!, GoDaddy and many other web hosting companies offer them. You can also purchase programs that you can load onto your own computer.

In the time it takes to choose a template and figure out where to put in your content, you can almost instantly have a presence on the World Wide Web. Nowadays, almost anyone can have their own website without knowing a lick of HTML coding or having any graphic art skills. Nope, it’s not like back in the late ‘90’s when everything was accomplished by hand coding and the like.

And yes, tens-of-thousands of people use these site builders and are quite pleased with them. However, there’s a big “but”, and that is …

How Easy is it to Integrate New Software or Scripts? Or is it Even Possible?

I can assure you from personal experience, that even if you find a website builder that looks like it’ll be more than what you need, in not too much time, if you are serious about having a real online presence, you will invariably want to customize your site in probably more than one way.

Maybe you’ll want to add the really neat interactive chat box you saw offered for $100.00 and is said to increase sales conversions by 20%. Maybe you’ll want to add a PHP script that allows for easy banner ad rotations. Maybe you’ll want to be able to make simple font color changes to your sub-headers across your entire site with the click of one button, instead of having to go into each page and manually change the coding. I think you get my point.

Most all the people I know in this group (myself included back in the beginning of my online marketing experience), think “No big deal. I’ll just tweak this program without much trouble at all! I can do it!” Do you know HTML? Do you know about CSS? Do you have the graphic editor to change image sizes? Etc., etc.

How Much Time Do You Have to Devote to the Learning Curve Involved?

The honest truth of all this is most of these add-ons are usually NOT easy to install, or easy to customize, or easy to get to work seamlessly with other functions on your site. So, let the many many hours of your new learning curve begin (groan). This truth is based on my very own personal experience with my very first website.

Or another issue which is all-too-true: I discovered (years ago with my first website – I paid a company good money in order to utilize their site builder and hosting program) that I couldn’t use a rather simple PHP program I wanted to purchase and integrate into my DIY site because I was told PHP wasn’t compatible with the site builder program.

The light bulb on just how limiting this site builder website was, and how incapable I was to move ahead with necessary improvements to the site now went on for me.

Why a Custom Built Website is Really Quite Cost Effective in the Long Run

So now, I realized this affordable website builder wasn’t really so affordable, because it couldn’t be integrated with what really was a very simple PHP script. It couldn’t do what I wanted it to, and there was no way I could integrate the software I wanted to have on my site.

But sometimes issues aren’t even as complicated as this. Perhaps you begin realizing that your “amateur” designed website is looking like just that … amateurish! If you’re serious about a professional, online presence, and you’re like the vast majority of us, you’ll soon realize you don’t have the skills, nor the TIME to spend in order to learn everything it will take to build out a good looking and user friendly website.

Honesty, all that I’ve shared here is exactly what happened to me.

Even more importantly, you and I are NOT a professional web developer! So no matter how hard we might try, we really haven’t a clue as to how to build a properly coded, W3 compliant, SEO friendly, and easily navigable website! Did I forget professional in appearance, also?

As example, do you know:

• The ramifications of having a confusing navigational hierarchy?
• How to easily collect the email addresses of everyone that visits your site in order to help build up your mailing list?
• The proper width a website should and shouldn’t be?
• Why you should never design a site using frames?
• Why having a splash page for your intro page is a bad idea?
• Why using some of those fancy fonts in your content you like so much might not be a good idea?
• About browser compatibility issues?
• And this list could go on and on …

Are You Really Serious About Your Online Presence?

There’s a saying “put your best foot forward”. This saying also truly applies to your website. I don’t care if it is only a three page site that showcases your brick and mortar store and is meant to only attract local traffic; or an e-commerce store selling your handmade products; or a site to promote your professional services; or a blog where you hope to generate some AdSense income.

No matter what the marketing purpose is of your website or blog … if you’re serious about a long-term online presence, then a custom site will prove to be a winner for you in every way you can imagine. No kidding.

I’ve laid out these all too true scenarios for you, because professionally I encounter this “I can do it myself much cheaper” mentality too often than not. Hey I told you … I too was basically guilty of that attitude when I first got into online marketing. In defense of myself, and for lots of other people too, I’ll admit it … I didn’t know any better that I should do some online research about custom versus site builder sites. Newbies really don’t know. I understand that now.

I can only encourage you to investigate the option of starting out your new online marketing business with a custom-for-you website design. You don’t have to spend a lot. You can get a simple custom site, from honest designers, for around $500.00 on up (depends upon your needs).

Now granted, there certainly won’t be lots of bells and whistles if you’re only paying $500.00 to begin with. But the point is that you’ll have a cleanly coded site that can be improved upon easily as your needs grow. And there are ways your designer can include a built-in HTML editor for you, so you can pretty much do everything by yourself to keep your site updated with new content, ads, etc.

The bottom line here is this: I encourage you to investigate your options before you jump in head first with only MONEY – the “how much can I save?” mentality – ruling your decisions. Again, it is true that you do most times get what you pay for, and even if a custom design is only $100.00 more than what a DIY site builder site will cost you, I’d vote for spending the extra $100.00 now, and forego the daily Starbucks or Seven-11 slurpees for a month or two.

I’d love to discuss how I might provide you with your very first website or how I can revamp, update and improve your existing site. Please visit my Custom Website Design Services page for more information.