Cheap web design is occasionally seen as enticing and a good option for new businesses starting from scratch.
For some reason many business owners will spend big bucks on regular business expenses – like office fit-outs, the latest greatest computers, offline advertising etc, and yet think it’s perfectly OK to spend $995.00 on a new website. Firstly here’s the best advice we can give you where to put that $995.00 – take the cash, go to the bathroom, throw the $995 into the toilet and then.. flush. Seriously.
Well we’re not that serious, but then again we probably are..
Lets look at the 4 main reasons why trying for a cheap website is a really bad idea:
Pure Logic and Arithmetic
If you go to a fancy restaurant and have a great meal for 4 people – you are spending about $300 – $400. Add another $100 on Ubers and unexpected expenses and there’s your cheap website. One night out equals a key driver of your business image and marketing? Another way to look at it is this – even if you allow $100 per hour for a reasonably competent website person, that means 10 hours max will be spent on getting your website up and running. In terms of getting a website that is pre-built to attract Google, fully custom designed, and built with the right sales funnels to attract the right customers and get sales or leads, well …that is literally not possible.
Welcome to the Land of The Invisible
Many business owners have reported (you probably know one or two) that they got a ‘really good deal’ on their website, but then after a few months realised that they have had no calls, no enquiries, and simply no action from their website. When they eventually go to Google to search for their product or service, their website is not there. As in – totally invisible to Google. The reason for this is simple – a website built without regard for your target market, without any keyword research and with no practical SEO integration cannot possibly attract Google or visitors. Again this is simple arithmetic. If your competitors are even spending a little bit of time and money on getting themselves in front of the right visitors in search, how can you possibly compete with a $995.00 website? You can’t.
The Myth of the Free and Cheap Website
Another way business owners can get stung going for a cheap or free website is the fabulous ‘Add Ons’ lark. How this works is as follows: you get enticed by glossy TV ads that promise to get your business thriving with a ‘Free’ website (or a cheap outsourced $995.00 website). When your website has been up and running for a while you notice that you can’t see if you have any visitors. So you pay $XX for analytics or a statistics dashboard. Then you realise that there is no SEO on the website, so you buy the ‘SEO Add On’. Then you want to take enquiries from an enquiry form and you buy the ‘contact add on’ and … you get the idea. By the time you get a website that is actually working for you and actively marketing your business, you have spent over and above what you should have spent in the first place. That’s how you end up wasting precious time, spending more and more money and getting stressed and frustrated – all because you thought that the cheap website would actually save you money.
The most famous ‘buy cheap’ catchphrase..
You may have heard this saying once or twice before –
If you buy cheap, you pay twice.
What this means is fairly obvious – when you start out paying for a cheap website, you will eventually end up paying twice (at least..). This is because when you realise that you need to have your website properly crawl-able by search engines, or have your content redone so it reads well, or add in more photos to replace bad stock photos, you will pay again and again to eventually get the website that your business deserves.
So, rather than buy cheap, contact Marmoset today and we’ll set you on the straight and narrow and let you know what you should be investing for an effective website for your particular business and market.
