What do you need to consider for a website as a business owner?
Nearly 90% of people search the internet for local businesses or products. This means that if you don’t have a great website, you are losing customers and business.
After working with many different marketing agencies and customers, one question I get a lot is, “how much money should I spend on my website?”
Below is what you need to consider.
1. What is your goal?
Without knowing the goal of your business, you are flying blind. How do you know if you will get what you want when you don’t know where you are headed? Sit down and decide what the goal of your business is and that will help you narrow down how you need to build your website. Some examples would be:
- Are you validating a product idea? Maybe start with a landing page.
- Are you starting a side hustle? Maybe start with a website built in WIX or Square space to just get started.
- Are you looking to land bigger customers? You will need to spend more money to build something unique and professional to attract those customers.
2. How much should you spend on your website?
Okay, let me get into some details. When you are creating a new website, these are the points you want to consider:
- What platform is it being built on?
- Is it built on a template?
- Is branding completed?
- Is marketing research needed?
- Is there a designer involved?
- Is the developer different from the designer?
- Check out why every website needs 2 people.
- Do you need a content writer?
- Do you need photography?
- Is there specific functionality you need?
- Will the website support your future growth?
When you consider all these points, you can break the website down into some price ranges below.
Note: There are exceptions, but this is, on average, what you can expect.
Low Budget: $0-$5,000
This could be a good place to start if you won’t rely on your website initially to get customers. You will need to redo it in 1-2 years.
Size of website: 1 to 10 pages
- Built using a template, and requires content from you
- Designer and developer are the same person
- No thought given into branding, colors, typography, audience targeting, etc
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an afterthought
- No custom functionality
- May get lucky with an e-commerce website priced at this point
- Many of these budget websites are outsourced, with poor results
Medium Budget:$5,000-$15,000
Size of website: 5-20 pages
If you have the budget, this is where I recommend you start for most small/medium businesses.
- Includes branding, logo, typography, messaging
- Website includes a designer and a developer
- Not built from a template. esign is custom and builder is used
- Includes a content writer to write copy that focuses on your customers
- Custom features
- E-commerce websites
- Customer photography
- SEO-optimized structure and foundation
High Budget:$15,000+
Size of website: 5+ pages
Once you reach this level, everything becomes more customized. The website will be custom-coded, without the use of templates or builders.
- Visual and market research-backed branding: logos, typography, colors, competitor research, messaging, etc.
- Websites are designed first, then custom coded to ensure speed and performance
- Content writers using market research and creating customer profiles to target content
- Ability to add custom features at any point due to being built from ground up
- E-commerce functionality, custom check outs, integration with CRMs and other funnels.
- Built on a strong SEO foundation and content is built with SEO in mind
Building a website is a journey and doesn’t end when you complete it.
Let me share my story on how I built my website.
When starting my business, I began by building the website myself. In the beginning, my work wasn’t so pretty. I didn’t have the cash flow so that is what I had to settle with. Then I had someone build me one for cheap ( $1000), which was an improvement on what I had. But it still wasn’t great.
Once I built my business and had some money to spend, I spent 5k+ for design and then developed the website myself. The reason for this is that I want to work with medium-sized companies and I needed my website to build trust. On top of that, I needed the website to answer many of the questions upfront and show people I’ve done this before. Now I could say my website has had more than $10k+ put into it as I continue to build it out.
As you can see, there are many considerations when it comes to building a website, and I’ve only really scratched the surface here. If you need help deciding how to build yours, feel free to book a meeting with me below and I’d be happy to walk you through it.
