A guide to understanding website costs and what goes into creating a website.
While most start-ups and small businesses recognise the importance of having a website to help with marketing and professional presence, unless the owners come from a marketing or technical background very few know what’s involved in creating a quality website.
By quality – we mean one that reflects your brand essence, creates a pleasant visitor experience, has the right SEO foundations to help you on the path to ranking higher on Google and has all the security you need to protect your investment.
Following we outline the various elements that are typically part of our website engagements and related costs.
CREATION
SEO Terms
Our first step is to understand what the key search phrases related to your offering are, how many people are searching for them each month and how do your rank for those search terms. This will help us identify where there is opportunity for you and where there is work to be done and what is the focus keyword for the home page and other pages.
Key Messages
Your website needs to promote not just your offering but why you – why should prospects buy from you rather than someone else – as well as what is the benefit of buying your product and service. Don’t assume people will understand the benefits of what you are offering. The stronger your WHY (your brand’s purpose) the more compelling your position. This is key foundational work that needs to be done before you start writing your website. You can read more about WHY here.
Putting the two together
When we write copy for your website, we need to ensure that it works for SEO but also that it’s engaging and conveys your key messages through headlines and prominent copy. You can read more about our content creation services here.
Home Page Design
Your home page is like the cover of a magazine. It’s where we summarise the important aspects of your business with fast click throughs to the main pages for essential information.
In planning the layout of your home page and look and feel we need to ensure it does not look like your competitors.
Images
We select the best images for each page on your website, from a specially directed photo shoot, your own supplied images or professional photo libraries. (A photography shoot can be amortised across website and other marketing costs and will give you highly original images to promote your uniqueness). Getting images and headlines working together can be very tricky as you need the write photographic background for the words to stand out. This background can change when the same page and is viewed on a mobile device. With 50% of websites being viewed on mobiles or tablets, websites need to work for both.
SEO Foundations
Part of writing the copy for websites is ensuring you have just the right number of SEO elements incorporated into each page. This involves having subheadings, SEO meta descriptions for each page and SEO meta data attached to each image.
DESIGN & BUILD
Platform
Our websites are built in WordPress as it is easy for clients to manage post build. We add plug-ins as required to provide extra functionality we may need for your site, e.g. social media feeds, firewalls for security, etc. Some of these plug-ins require annual license renewals, however this is more cost-effective than building in a more expensive and complex system from the get go.
Branding your Site
Working with our Home Page Layout (in terms of what needs to be conveyed on the home page) our designers get to work to design your website. This requires selecting suitable fonts and colours to reflect your brand identity. Typically you will see a Home page and Top Menu page design to approve the look before other pages are created.
Responsive Site
As our website developers build your site they constantly look at how each page appears on a large screen, a small laptop and a smartphone. Our websites are built in WordPress which has containers to manage the flow of information and the alignment of design.
Image Optimisation
All of the images need to be cropped to standard sizes for consistency across your site. They also need to be optimised to ensure they are of good quality but not too large so they don’t take forever to load.
SEO Tweaking
For better SEO performing sites we cross link pages throughout the site and to some key external sites.
Testing
Once the website is built it is tested on different browsers and on different monitors to ensure it looks good in all situations. We also test any forms that have been created to ensure that information is captured and automatically emailed to the nominated contact.
Hosting
There once was an Australia television advertisement for Castrol GTX with the tagline: ‘Oils ain’t Oils’. The same can be said about hosting, an annual ongoing website cost. Our hosting is managed in Australia with a reputable company and a local support team. They are not going to go out of business and leave your stranded and unable to access your website. Importantly we aim to host on servers that will serve up your site fast. This includes not having too many websites hosted on the same server. Our hosting packages include 30 days of back-up.
Training
Our website costs includes a free 2 hour training session on the website and how to edit pages, add images, blog and calendar items etc.
Maintenance & Security
These typically are optional but recommended extras to the build of a website.
Maintenance is done on a quarterly basis and ensure all the latest upgrades from WordPress Core and plug-ins are up to date. This helps with security of your site as developers release patches for any security holes. It covers annual licences for any plug-ins that require licences (eg. SSL & Forms).
Security Software to protect you from Virus and Malware from hackers is recommended. This service includes removing malware and re-instating your website. Even our website is targetted by hackers from all over the world nearly every day.
Worth the Investment
With website costs it’s important to remember you are not creating a website from scratch every year. The initial year does require a more substantive investment with subsequent years having ongoing work that is less than the build year. For SEO purposes it’s good to keep updating your website as static websites or brochureware tend to be downgraded by Google.
Most organisations require a major website rebuild every 5-7 years. As your website is typically your main marketing and database development tool it deserves the adequate investment and significant portion of your marketing budget in the build or re-build year.
