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.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
[...] at a later date so she could have saved money on the domain name and hosting but as a previous post points out hosting is not going to cost much more than [...]
January 13th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Some of the steps mentioned above can be sped up by using an optimised hosting account. For example many NZ ISP’s still offer the same dumb hosting accounts they had in 1996!
For example – You probably want unlimited databases so that other web based applications can be added to the cloud as once you have a web server this becomes an add on.
I’d also go with WordPress rather than Joomla as user interface on WordPress is much better now and going forward that platform offers more scope in my opinion.
Some of the design side can be fast started by picking a theme that is closer to what is wanted but 4 hrs is light in my view.
The questions around resourcing time don’t fully take into account testing iterations and approval processes.
The reality is that researching variations and creative options (especially) can also take time so from a budget perspective you mostly have to work backwards.
Clients all have different learning and communication modes. For example some respond better to a live prototyping approach and others need detailed planning well ahead of time.
Understanding the best approach for each client is a key need by the developer.
So for creative especially you may have to ration time to get a baseline and then work on incremental improvements over time.
Having a payback factor in mind is a good idea but returns are also not strictly linear as it can take time for critical mass to be achieved and ongoing time needs to be invested in adding new content.
A website is like a marketing snapshot and needs to fit into the context of other marketing activities.
Single shot campaigns never work as well as rolling multi wave programmes.
Many individuals and organisations also like to stage website changes or development as it becomes easier to respond to feedback loops when there is a baseline so roadmaps are always good.
January 13th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
@Jason Instead of Joomla I could use WordPress or Drupal but the choice of software depends upon what and how you want to deliver solutions. The timings are the quickest that you could reasonably build a professional site.
Thanks for your comments!