How Much Does It Cost To Build A Small Business Website?

"How Much Does It Cost To Build A Good Basic Website That Works?" The key word is a website that works. Each week I get the same question: "How much is it going to cost me to build a small business website?

Certainly, prices are all over the board, but realistically to build something that looks good, presents your company well, converts visitors into leads, and of course places high at Google, MSN, and Yahoo! - isn't going to be $500.

You get what you pay for and your friend who builds websites will cost you more sales than you want to even think about.

Low cost websites often use templates. You may ask why is that a big deal. Unforntunately with the 4 second rule, web visitors will think your template website is a reflection on your work or worst your brand. It can also mean that your competitions website could look a lot like yours, further hurting your companies image.

Even "do-it-yourself" is becoming less effective and I'm getting a lot of calls from those people saying "I used to get a lot of inquiries." It only takes one competitor to build and promote a better website than yours - and you'll see your market-share slip away very quickly. I've seen this happen to 20 year veterans in the industry. It's pretty horrible.

You should always choose a web team or web company. One advantage of choosing a team or web design company is because these companies will have a designers, SEO expert, project managers, and internet marketing specialists all under one roof. It also makes your project's chances of success increase exponentially.

So many of our small business customers come to our company after going with a freelancer to build their small business visit our corporate website at www.WebXinc.com). But a lot of small business are getting savoy to the idea of you get what you pay for. If you think of how much a billboard cost ($15,000 a month), a website should cost more than $1,500 dollars...

Here are some basic guidelines to keep in your notes if you're thinking about a small business website that is not interactive or database driven.

1) Design

This is one of the biggest areas of investment when build a small business website and where you separate yourself from your competition. A talented designer with online graphics experience will probably put in about 40 to 80 hours into a design. This will include making mock-ups, getting your approval, testing in multiple environments and implementing your ideas to website reality.

As long as they know their stuff and have online experience, the investment is a no-brainer. The designer will also work closely with a programmer who understands how to write standard code that is optimized for performance, functionality, and of course, search engines. The designer will work with your online marketing person to integrate the marketing copy and keywords/phrases that are required if you want any chance at a top-ranked website.

Make sure you avoid templates no matter how great they look.

Investment: $6,000 and up

2) SEO Programming

Make no mistake, if you don't have clean, fast-loading, search engine friendly code behind the scenes at your website you're in trouble with search engines.

Recently I wrote about "4 seconds" being all you have before visitors start to think about leaving a website! These issues will have web visitors heading for their back-button faster than you can say "don't leave yet! The programmer will also have to make sure all the proper keywords, keyword phrases, headings, marketing copy, alt-image tags, and page title tags are properly installed.

Think of choosing an SEO package that maintains your organic web site listing every month. These packages can range from $250 to $1000 a month depending on what services will be performed. But monthly SEO programming gets much better results than the one time work. Contact WebXperts.com at 404-870-0020 for SEO packages for businesses of all sizes

Investment: $2,500 (and up)

3) Hosting

It all comes together and is placed on a hosting server with your domain name tied to it. Usually, your hosting server also manages your incoming and outgoing email.

I talked with a woman last week who hadn't received any email from her website for almost a week. She figures it cost her over $3000 in lost sales and cost her a $15,000 catering job. Her website hosting company was the problem and she opted for one of these $9.95/month hosting solutions. You get what you pay for and when it comes to hosting and technical support so I recommend you avoid the the lowest-cost-provider.

Put another way, putting your website on cheap hosting is like building a house on sand.

Managed hosting is better than shared hosting because you have a team responsible and familiar with your project.

Investment: $1500/year and higher

4) HTML and other Web programming languages

An webprogrammer worth their salt is going to run you $5,000 or more. A good web programmer is going to tie in the web design and the SEO programming together with programming languages to make you site work. A good web programmer is going to understand design and usability issues, the importance of page copy (marketing communications), traffic development strategy, search engine optimization, search engine marketing (pay-per-click), and conversion.

Outsourcing this to a foreign company can cost you thousands. Make sure your web team is local or at least well known in the U.S.

Investment:$5,000 or more

5) Total Investment: $15,000 or more

If designed correctly, and integrated with an effective online marketing strategy, your website should generate 70 to 90% of your new business (after word-of-mouth). It should be the most cost-effective advertising and marketing you're doing for your business. If it isn't - something is wrong.

Your website should generate twenty inquiries a day (minimum) once established in the search engine databases. Especially if you're in a big market area (i.e. Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Orlando). I know that they can - because I see this first hand with many of my client's websites. If you're not getting those type of results you have to ask yourself: Why not?