A small business owner friend of mine is looking at building a website, essentially a brochure website made up of 8 pages.  He has had quotes from $2000 – $24000 which I am sure you will agree is a huge range.  The latest quote is for $2000 but only includes the technical software setup of a website.  In order to help him qualify the costs for building a simple website I sent him the following information with key tasks plus man hours.

1. Define what the website is trying to achieve – 4-8 hours

2. Purchase the domain name (company.com, company.co.nz, company.com.au etc) and sort out routing tables: 1 hour

3. Purchase one years hosting: 30 mins ($120-200 per year ongoing costs)

4. Design logo and colour schemes: 4 hours

5. Design site including keywords and SEO: 4-8 hours 

6. Review design etc: 0 – 12 hours

7. Install, configure, plugins, deploy design etc with Joomla: 2-4 hours

8. Write the content (Harder than you think): 4-12 hours

9. Build links back to site: 2 hours

10. Setup Analytics: 1 hour

11. Build roadmap, version 1, version 2, version 3 etc

Basically the costs would be in the region of:

Labour: $2000

Hosting: $180

Domains: $80

Total: $2260

Not a bad price for a professionally designed website.

We could also add in email, collaboration, wikis, forums, documents but these capabilities would be part of the roadmap and cost a bit more but no more than $60 per user.

The most important aspect of a website project is understanding why the client wants/needs a website.  Some typical reasons;

“to generate more leads”

“to inhance the company’s reputation”

“to sell more”

I am a bit of a slave driver and I like the x10 (times ten) factor.  The x10 factor says for every dollar I invest in lead / reputation generation I expect ten dollars worth back.

If we think of our website costs above in order to invest $2000 in a website the return should be $20000.  If the marketing object is to increase sales then we would expect the website to deliver an additional $20k of sales.  In order to prove that the website delivers this value we need the customer to be focused on collecting these metrics.

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