Why the cheapest can be the most expensive
How much harm can a bad website do to a business?
Things we are talking aboutPosted by Jonathan on 21 August 2010
It is a sensible strategy in business – as it is in any part of our lives – to consider the cost of choosing one web design company over another. Not doing this would mean that you or your company either do not care enough about your project, or are having such an amazing financial year that money is no longer an object. We hope it is the latter.
Back in the real world, considering the costs that you are exposed to in creating a website, web tool or web system of any kind, is one of the – perhaps the – most important factor in the decision making process. However, the decision making process is always more difficult if you do not know how to benchmark the quality of one company against another, and on balance, to find the best value option.
So, how do you find the balance if you don’t know how you can benchmark companies who are pitching for your project? It can be painful experience to find that the old adage about the cheapest option being the most expensive is true. But how much harm can a bad website do to a business? How much business can it lose you? The honest answer is that its often very difficult to know the true cost of a bad website, as the potential customers do not contact you, so you can end up assuming the business just was not there.
A good and workable strategy in building a web business if you are on a tight budget is to slim down the initial requirement, and work with a quality web company to produce high quality, standards compliant, well designed, web design work. This enables you to test your market at a lower initial cost and then build on the initial work at the same high quality as the business starts to move. If you’ve chosen the right web design company, then they will be able to help you manage your budget to best effect.
It iss fair to say that at this point you could be considering the approach above and taking the view that it would be better to just ‘get something online’ as soon as possible. This is not necessarily the case – in fact, often it can be detrimental to do this. A quickly launched website, not handled in the correct way, often becomes the website you end up with over the longer term, as to manage costs you will likely be trying to re-use many elements from your initial web design release.
A poorly designed and constructed website could cost you business, and defeat the object of saving you and your business money by meaning you need to think about launching a new website sooner rather than later. Good, standards compliant websites should have a lifespan of three years or more.
Questions to ask the agency
- The average size of the project work carried out
- Whether they have worked with your industry before
- To see their portfolio
- To speak to some references (make sure these aren’t ‘friends of the family’ and are pure, unbiased references)
- Whether the has long-term clients
- Whether they produce standards compliant websites
- Whether they produce their websites using tables or CSS (if they say tables,
run a mile!) - Will I be dealing with the same people during the project that I’m dealing with
Questions to ask yourself
- Do you like them?
- Do they listen to and take on board what you say?
- Do they understand that although they may be an expert in the web industry, you are the expert in your industry?
- Do they respond quickly to questions, and are happy to take the time to discuss in follow up calls?
- Should you get something launched quickly, or wait a little while longer and get a more considered end result?
In the end, choosing a web company is going to be about where you perceive the best value to be. So how do you define value? Here is an example for you. Company A pitches a web project at 1X. Company B pitches a web project at 2X (twice the price of the other offering). Your company has an average sale price of £10,000. You base your company on quality and standing out from your competitors. How many extra sales would it take you to make the difference back? If that website and web company is considerably better than the lower priced offering, will it help you sell more?
Truthfully, the answer is that it depends on your product and service. If you are a reflexologist, working from home, you would not necessarily benefit from paying 2x – you probably only need a site that will be simple and a low cost website will do it. However, if you are a growing company with larger value sales, working on your SEO and depending on selling to customers the difference in quality, you would do well to consider what will really bring in the projects. If you think the company offering a solution at 2x will do better in this respect, it will be worth the difference.
