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I had a potential client approach me the other day, wanting to know if yours truly could help them build a website for their business.
“Sure” I said, “why do you want a website?”
The following discussion was interesting, to say the least, but unfortunately not the first one of its kind I’ve ‘enjoyed’.
The potential client wanted a website because they believed that every business needed to have a website. They had gone away and thought about what keywords and phrases they wanted (bonus points to them) but not researched the Demand and Supply numbers for those words and phrases.
They weren’t interested in maintaining it or adding new value to it, they just desired static brochure-ware.
They wanted to deal with someone in this state and they had heard through mutual friends that I was ‘in the business’ so approached me.
It turns out that they had approached others, including one person they had found on the internet who resided in a different state in this wide brown land we call Australia. That person quoted $275 for a six-page website.
When told this I nearly fell out of my chair.
Just to put the record straight, I don’t charge less than $3,000 for a site (unless there is special reason to do so).
Why the large differential? Because, I would humbly suggest, I know what I am doing.
There is a vast world of difference between someone who knocks a site together using FrontPage on the weekend, perhaps someone’s teenage son or daughter at high school, and someone who spends a large amount of time carefully considering the following:
- the ‘ease of navigation’ issues
- the keyword/phrase Demand and Supply equations
- the intended audience
- the words used on the site
- the support material used to create ’stickiness’ (including free branded giveaways)
- the cross-browser presentation issues
- CSS-P issues
- hosting and support
- domain name suitability (particularly for SEO - Search Engine Optimisation)
- frequency of re-submission to search engines
- linking strategy to/from other sites
- rss options and choice implications
- statistics
- the very important ‘look and feel’ of the site - what message do the visuals communicate? what message does the intra-site linking communicate?
- keyword linking strategy and tactics (which ties in with Demand and Supply metrics)
- …and more, but I want to keep those ‘up my sleeve’
Why do I go to such trouble?
Because the old adage “build it and they will come” just does not work on the internet. You have to be a savvy marketer as well as a savvy designer and builder to have a website succeed on the internet.
And if as a business owner you are truly serious about your site, you want someone who actually cares about your site’s success and will work with you over the coming months and years to ensure it changes and grows to meet market needs and solve potential customers’ headaches.
Sure, you can pay $275 and get a six-page website, but where do you host it? And more importantly, what words are you using on your site? A skilled wordsmith (such as many of my regular readers of this humble blog) are skilled precisely because they have honed their talents and abilities with perspiration and dedication. Such craftsmanship does not come quickly, nor cheaply to them.
Nor should it come cheaply to the client.
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