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Getting Exactly What You Pay For
| Written by David A. Farrell | Published 07-04-07 - Updated 01-02-08 | Page 01 of 01 |
Looking to save a little time and money on the design and development of your next website? Shop around the Internet for a web designer, even for just a couple minutes, and you may easily find any number of web design companies willing to produce a website for you for only a couple hundred dollars (cheap) and in a very short period of time (fast). But cheap and fast is not always the best bargain when looking for a website. In fact, cheap and fast often costs more time and money than higher-priced websites because of the added aggravation and investment involved when website’s need to be redone, which more often than not is exactly what happens.
The Point And The Pinch
As in any business medium, exposure is everything. There are only two things people want when they post a their new websites to the Internet: They want to be seen and they want to be heard. Of course when I say ‘heard’ I mean people want to get their messages out there to other people. But you get my point: The name of the game is exposure. The more exposure your website has the more likely you are to have met your online purpose. And if you’re like most prospective site owners, and that purpose is the sale of your company’s products and/or services, your exposure is your ‘bread and butter’, directly, proportionally and without apology.
Inadequate websites fail in this respect because not enough time and money go into them to produce the one thing that really matters most on the Internet -quality content. Plain and simple, the very best websites on the Internet are always developed around good, quality content. Everything else (flash inclusion, snappy designs, photography, music and/or video accenting, and sometimes even the marketing strategies employed) is a distant second to the site’s actual content, or ‘copy’ (words on the page), used in its construction. A site’s content is the real driving force behind online recognition, something only to be gained through sufficient research and planning. This inevitably costs prospective site owners money. The reason? On the brick and mortar side of construction lives a real human being putting in his or her valuable time and energy. Your money equals, without equivocation, the value placed on that person’s time and energy. The more you value your designer’s time and energy the more it will reflect in what they produce. So a key thing to keep in mind when looking to have a website built is: You get what you pay for.
Where There's Value There's Gain
I hate throwing all these hokey colloquialisms around, but ‘time is (definitely) money’, especially in this industry. The less money you put into your website the less time your web designer is going to spend developing it. Designer ‘energy’ is lost as an inevitable consequence of low funding. And visitors to your site will recognize this and respond accordingly. How, you ask? Your website will not fulfill its promise if it does not satisfy the needs of its visitors; they will either not return or never find their way to your site in the first place because its content will have little or no value in the eyes of search engines. Lousy sites get little traffic. Great sites get plenty of traffic, as well as return traffic along with a surplus of visitors from word-of-mouth, which in turn leads to more traffic and even more visitors from word-of-mouth. In the end, all these people stopping by your website translate into high PR (PageRank) on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL Search. And that’s where you really want to be -ranked high in the queries of these four search companies, or rather regarded as highly relevant within your site’s particular field or genre.
In this vein, the real goal of website construction is to develop a site to the point of its being deemed a ‘subject matter expert.’ A subject matter expert is ‘king of the hill’ on the Internet. Such sites are ranked highest in their individual fields and/or genres, and usually take up the most resources (time, money, and energy) to produce. But the benefits of being in command of a subject matter expert site is well worth the cost and generally incalculable in value. How much would you pay to have your site ranked number one for a variety of keywords and keyword phrases within your particular field or genre? It’s hard to say, right? It’s even harder for a designer to give a web design quote because the cost of such a website varies from field to field, genre to genre. Regardless, they also tend to be expensive. And that’s why most designers don’t or can’t provice a web design quote. The most they can do is to provide clients with the very best possible website development for the cost -the universal aim among ninety percent of the web designers you’ll come across in your search. I reiterate, the more you spend on your website the better your website will usually be.
The One 'What If?'
But what if you really do want your site to be number one? This is a question many cheap and fast web design companies don’t concern themselves with. One thing all prospective site owners need to remember when looking to have a site built is that cheap and fast is a web design company’s 'cash cow'. It’s basically ‘money for nothing.’ Bring up decent PR to a company that deals in cheap and fast and just watch what happens. The price of your website will quickly climb (as it should) to cover the cost of the extra time and energy anticipated to make good PR happen for your site. If the cost of the site’s construction does not climb, quickly find another web design company because you’re probably about to be taken for a ride. The best thing you can do is be prepare, which means being well-organized prior to contacting a web designer and being open-minded to the potential costs of reaching that goal. Money is like anything else: it begets itself. Realize what a good site is worth to you, spend, and then reap the rewards once your online business bears its fruit.
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