How Much Should You Spend On A Website?
How much should you pay for a website?
Great question. What’s fair? What makes sense? Where do you even begin? We’ve put together this guide to help you determine what businesses pay for their marketing efforts and what value certain services have to the market in order for you to determine how much you should be paying for your company’s marketing efforts.
Let’s start with the basics. We believe every company should be spending money to highlight their business including the products and services they provide. We wish that it was possible to just open up a business, invite all your friends to like your page on social media, start posting and watch the business come flowing in. It doesn’t work that way. Yes, some businesses get lucky, but most don’t. So we need to set ourselves up for success. Do you have a good product or service? Let’s start putting efforts in place to let our market know what we have to offer and why they should consider doing business with us.
Website
Everyone is online so that’s where our business needs to be. First of all, we need a website that converts. What do we mean by that? Well, it’s not enough to just have a website. We need a website that captures our audience, is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and works the audience towards taking action. Whether that be leaving their information by inquiring about a product or service or getting them to sign up for constant useful information, we need to have specific goals for our website and make it easy for the user to take action and gain the information they need. The content on your website must be clear, and concise. Building out an effective website that looks beautiful and is effective at helping you execute your business objectives must be priority #1.
How much do we spend on a website? If you’re doing this yourself with a website builder, you’re probably looking at around a few hundred dollars a year for the website editor platform, domain, and hosting options. Using SSL is a must so go ahead and pay for that as well. Now, if you want a professional to build out your website, you’re going to pay a few thousand dollars. Yes, you can probably get someone to build out a cookie-cutter website for $500-$1000, but you get what you pay for. If you’re going to go this route you might a well take a few courses and do it yourself. That way you only have yourself to blame when your website sucks and actually hurts your business. If someone comes to your website and it looks a mess, it says a lot about your business. They’re probably not going to want to do business with you either. Therefore, your website is actually hurting your business. So don’t do that.
Start by looking at your competition. Look at businesses in other market areas to see how they’re designed. What do you like? What don’t you like? Ask some random people to comb through websites you like and see what they think. Gather data and then execute your plan. Your website is your business so make it count. Make a good impression, make it easy on the eyes, and make it easy for your visitors to get what they want. This is YOUR business we’re talking about. Put in the time and effort. If you hire a professional be open to recommendations and suggestions. However, stay firm on what your want and how you want things to look. Once it’s built, pay very close attention to your analytics and how people are using your site. Follow the data, and make adjustments. Remember, what you want is to give your visitors what THEY WANT. You get what you want when they get what they want, and what they want takes priority over everything. Be relentless, good things take time but DO NOT let your online presence suffer because you wanted to save a couple of bucks. Save the money and do it right. No shortcuts. Do it right, you do it light, do it wrong you do it long….and it’s going to cost you money when you do it long.
Our recommendations. We like bluehost for hosting, domains, and SSL. If you’re a DIY, we recommend wordpress as a website builder/editor, also known as a CMS. If you want the most user friendly option, we recommend doing everything through WIX. Happy building you addabadass.