Once I heard of an SEO client who paid $8000 for a site that really does nothing for them. It is a B2B site that provides site visitors certain services and it positively does nothing to convert traffic into gross sales. Their entire budget went to design which was outsourced to a small website design company in Romania. They did the job half way and finished the site with nice layout but dysfunctional back end. They supposed to get the job done as they stated in contract within 3 months, but it took them more than one year to get the job done!
The owner spent some money on PPC around $10000, they got visitors but did not convert to sales. Now they have no money left over to appropriately promote the site. Mistake number one do not pay too much money for a website design service, unless you know the company or trust their skills and sources.
The fact about online world is that there is no guessing.
You can measure pretty much anything. What are you trying to accomplish? Increase traffic? Generate leads? Increase sales? If it is yes to one of these questions, then a $8,000 investment should get you another $800,00 to your bottom-line? Can a B2B site deliver an 80-95% ROI?
Website design is a commodity today. The cost of design should represent about 25% of your total spend. Design costs are competitive today. There can be excellent open source Content Management Systems (CMS) that give you the power to manage your own content. The cost of the software is $0 to you. We advise utilizing WordPress. This platform provides you with Web 2.0 compliant back-end at low cost for setup and maintenance. However you do need to fix some security issues in order to prevent the site from hacking.
The value in web design is working with corporations that can properly market their product.. To properly advertise the site, you should be spending 10-12x what you should spend in design. So, it is possible to get a Web 2.0 website at an affordable cost. If you are a small company that is spending $4,000-$8,000 on a basic web page, you should plan over 12 months to spend an additional $40,000-$90,000 on advertising. The dollars or Euros spent on advertising brings the traffic to the site. Simple rule, more traffic through the front door means more business.
Nothing like other advertising, you can control your pay out and measure your ROI pretty quickly. You can turn your promoting dollars on and off depending on the performance, it is all measurable.
If you need help in evaluating a prospective vendor, here are particular question that may help you understand their knowledge ask yourself abd ask the web designer or company:
- How do you capture visitor traffic off the Internet? Can you track their movement through my site? If so, how?
- How do you manage pay per click advertising money to make certain you are maximizing your spend and not wasting money?
- How do you measure whether the site is friendly to users?
- How many page views would you estimate the site would get to determine the right level of hosting?
- What things will you need to change on the website? What things can be changed on the own?
- If you choose to change the look, does it require changes to the backend scripting on the site?
- What will it take to add a new page to match an ad we are running to the new site? For instance, I want to advertise a special and build a page specific for it, what will it take for us to do this?
- What do you anticipate the average cost per lead for the web page to be?
- Who owns the source code to the site?
Thus, think about your aims. Think about what you choose to accomplish and spend your money according to the results you aspire to achieve. A pretty web page just does not generate the type of results you should and can get applying the Internet.
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