PLEASE TELL ME THE APPROXIMATE COST OF D FOLLOWING WEBPACKAGE, JUST WANTED 2 ENSURE I’M NOT BEING MADE A FOOL?

Hush-a-Bye Baby

Commissioning a website for your company is like building your house, you need to do a tight rope walk between cost and quality. First of you need to decide :

a) Why you need the website (just an identity space on the web or to attract customers?)
b) Who is your target audience (Kids, Teens, entrepreneurs or working folk?)
c) What do you want your customers to experience on the web (a simple no-nonsense information website for the working class and adults or a flashy one that would keep the teens hooked to your site)
d) How important would your website be for your customers?

Now, what am I trying to say? answer these questions honestly and you wouldn’t get into this “do-it-yourself” deal this company is throwing at you.

There are four very important aspects to a website :

1. Where it is hosted – How would you feel when you tried buying something on E-Bay and it said “Page Cannot Be Displayed” because the site was down? you would probably be very angry and buy that product from a different site. The same concept applies to you website, site downtime=lost revenue+lost customer loyalty+increasing competition. There are a zillion companies out there offering hosting space at throw away prices but with unreliable server up times. Your hosting vendor should have a good record on their server up time. Now, why would the best hosting vendor in the industry offer his services at a low price, would you ?

2. Design – You could make the best flash website which could do some amazing things but bear this in mind that everytime someone visits your site, they are downloading the content and with half the world still on dial up and rest struggling with speeds at mbps level, a slow website is a bad website. Having said that, keeping your website plain too would not help. Find the right balance. If you ask me, for a small company, the size of your entire website shouldnt be more that 30 mb (assuming your not selling catalogued products on your site as those kind of sites will take up more space).

3. Control Panel – Your requirements, ideas, company philosophy might change anytime and you have to have your website reflect the same. Now, running to web designer to make small changes all the time is frustrating and expensive. Find out if they provide control panel free of cost to you. This way you correct typos, add, delete info as and when you want without incurring extra expenses.

4. SEO – Do you advertise your business in your local newspaper? if the answer is a yes, then you would need SEO and google ad-sense as these increase your business opportunities. If you can’t afford it don’t worry, build on your clientele and build a strong customer relationship, word of mouth is the best advertisement.

You may have realized that I haven’t specifically addressed your question on the cost but thats the point. It’s not just the cost that you have to factor in when building a good website. It’s your business, your dream, wouldn’t you want to look and perform the best for your customers?

TO BE THE BEST YOU WORK WITH THE BEST AND THEY DON’T WORK FOR LESS! – said by me

Best of luck!

Regards,

Metis.