What do you pay for your website?

[scleaning]

Hi All,

I'm looking at getting a website setup for my business and was just wondering what sort of price I should be paying (one off or monthly)?

I want something quality that is going to represent me well and hopefully pull in new customers.

Any advice would be appreciated - seems to be a lot of companies offering this service!

Thanks

 

[Newman]

OWN and host your URL. Buy your .com from godaddy or whatever and you can have it hosted there or on hostgator or something similar.

This will keep you in control of your online property if you choose to use another company down the road. Then you can give your web artist the password to build and modify your site.

Check out this middle aged housewife graphic designer (our target market). She does all of my design work for web and print.

www.creativealliancedesign.com

 

[Shane Deubell]

All over the place!

Paid $1500 for our first site and it sucked, $800 for a big sitezilla and recently had a couple smaller sites from friend for couple hundred bucks .
How big is your market?

 

[Desk Jockey]

$3,000.00 for sitezilla, spent way more time and money just getting everything together.

It's actually never finished, Dan adds things to it nearly every week....Sitezilla is getting bigger!

 

[Hoody]

With hosting and domain registry I paid $300. And then built the site myself, so my time.

 

[Jack May]

Depends what your time is worth.

If you have spare time to research and build, or if necessary, learn to build, you may do it cheaper, with results that will be unpredictable.

If you are flat out, you're best to pay someone else to do it for you.

SEO is the catch, will it pull customers???

I have built all three myself over the years. My first one went up early when I was quiet and I did it during one winter when I had plenty of time on my hands. It didn't bring in much work. I then tried to learn a bit more about seo and the second one did better.

Recently I have just done it again, its still not finished, but its pulling way better numbers than the last one.

In this case, I actually bought some code and edited it to my preferences with a little help from Fred and others.

John

 

[ruff]

Don't skimp on what is an important part your public face.

Most people don't know how to build a site and their aesthetics are not very good. Hire a professional (your clients do!)
Even if you are talented in that area, if you invest the same time in marketing, you'll still come ahead.

Price varies greatly. Are you happy with a template adjusted to your needs? What functionality do you want? and much more.
And once you build it, you still need it to show in all the important places. Use of right words and right language.

The more defined you will be in knowing what you want. The easier and cheaper it will be to get there and the better the results will be. So, do as much homework as you can ahead of time.

Of course you can hire somebody who will do it all for you, without any input from you whatsoever. Just don't be surprised if the site ends up being more them than you.

 

[trojancarpetcare]

We paid 600 for our website

 

[scleaning]

Thanks a lot for the replies guys, really helpful to hear from so many of you.

I will definitely not be attempting to build a site myself, I've read of a lot of people to do that, but surely if you add up the costs of your time it is not worth it? I do not service my own van or do my own books, prefer to outsource where I can to people who can do a better job than me.

Seems like some big variations in pricing which is interesting, I take it you all pay up front for the design and setup hosting seperately? Where did you find your designers? There are a few rivals in my area so I need something which will stand out from the crowd.

I've seen companies that offer a custom website and seo/marketing advice for $149 per month, good/bad idea?

 

[ruff]

Look at their sites and sites that they have built and see which one you like the best.

What would the SEO folks do for $149.00 a month? To me it seems expensive, and it really depends on what they ACTUALLY do for the $, lots of hoopla about this kind of service these days.