Shef_Fitness Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 What do fellow small businesses think? Is paying to have a professional money well spent in your opinion? Did you have an expensive website and did it increase your business or not make much difference, What are your thoughts on this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indizine Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 One could say, is it just as well to have your mate from the gym show you how to use the weights properly and how to get fit, or is using a professional trainer gonna be the way to get real results? The alternative to anything professional is DIY, fill-in-the-blanks-site-builders, or family n friends uncle's son who does it in their spare time. Pro web design is no different to any other service. Pay cheap, pay twice is the usual case scenario I often deal with. Even now, someone who knows I do web design went with someone else and he has PMd me from here asking me to review it to see if it was worth the fee being charged. Once I am clear about what was exactly included in the spec, I will give a fair response and will say if it was a good price and met the spec, for what parts I can see. The client who wants to pay £99 still wants a £500 website oddly enough. People say they haven't got a lot to spend but "I want a website like this" and proceed to display a link to a pro level website, even ones beyond our price league such as Mothercare, eBay, Crystal Palace, you name it! Obviously one thing you cannot review in advance is the promise of Google page 1 unless they keyword is 'dancing green elephants in surrey' of course! I say horses for courses, and as long as the website brings the results you want, then fair do's. But don't expect a cheap website to do the same as a more expensive one, if the spec is of higher quality to tie in with the price. Always compare on an exact like-for-like. 2 website prices are usually never for the same spec. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
easysite Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 I think a proffessional site can be achieved cheaply... One of our clients paid £3500 for her site and it is very plain and basic. She has moved to us and now has a proffesional site she has built using our diy kit and support. I think if you go down the buy and expensive site, make sure you know what you are getting, some will only do so many pages and then the extra fee's start piling on. And once you have paid so much for a site, its hard not to keep paying the fee's to get it finished. If you go down the Diy route, make sure you research the company and check out their support packages. The key is that if you dont know how to build a website, you need adequate support to guide you through. Hope this helps and good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
viper123 Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 What do fellow small businesses think? Is paying to have a professional money well spent in your opinion? Did you have an expensive website and did it increase your business or not make much difference, What are your thoughts on this? Spending a lot of cash wont get you a good web site, there are folk out there that will build you an all singing and dancing web site, nice to look at but most folk using it dont want fancy, They want easy to use. If you want to PM me I can give you a name, he will do it for 3 to £500.00 and you can have a perfectly good easy to use web site. He has done one for my company and it works real well, its not about the site its about getting folk to YOUR site, you can have the best site in the world but if its not getting the hits,, its usless. You need to make sure that whoever takes it on that they understand that the most important thing is getting the traffic and they have a plan to get you the traffic. a nice looking web page wont do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love2print Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 I didn't pay for a website (me and my partner built/designed it) so I can't comment directly onto whether an expensive website is worth it or not. However, I think if you have right skills you can build it yourself for very little cost. But if you don't have the skills it's worth paying someone else. The amount you should pay is going to vary depend on what you want the website to do. But you also need to watch out for people who are going to overcharge you because they know that you don't understand web design/development/seo. I always think when you are paying for any service to do your own research so you can get a better idea of the costs involved before getting a quote. That way you will know if the "expensive" website is worth it or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
viper123 Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 I didn't pay for a website (me and my partner built/designed it) so I can't comment directly onto whether an expensive website is worth it or not. However, I think if you have right skills you can build it yourself for very little cost. But if you don't have the skills it's worth paying someone else. The amount you should pay is going to vary depend on what you want the website to do. But you also need to watch out for people who are going to overcharge you because they know that you don't understand web design/development/seo. I always think when you are paying for any service to do your own research so you can get a better idea of the costs involved before getting a quote. That way you will know if the "expensive" website is worth it or not. I agree but as I was saying , the web site is the easy bit. Its getting folk to it thats the hard part, you have to know and understand how the serch engines work and how to get yourselves up the listings. Its a dark art, there are 100s of tricks that will get folk to your web site and not others selling the same product. Its all about key words and engineering the hits. The chap who looks after my site increased by buisness 10 fold in a few days and it was nothing to do with how the web site looked or how it worked. It was work outside the web site that got folk to the web site that made it. I am just trying to help and cant stress enugh you can have the best web page in the world but if no one gets ditected to it, its not worth 1p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steveroberts Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 What do fellow small businesses think? Is paying to have a professional money well spent in your opinion? Did you have an expensive website and did it increase your business or not make much difference, What are your thoughts on this? Define expensive? As long as the site generates more profit than it cost to set up, then the answer has to be yes? So, if the website is transactional, then the answer is easy to quantify. If it is a 'brochure' (which ours is), you'd need to measure how many customers contacted you through your website. For us, the answer is a definite yes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shef_Fitness Posted October 14, 2011 Author Share Posted October 14, 2011 The problem I find with DIY sites is that you have no idea how easy they are to use until you have paid over the money. If I knew I could operate the software in the sameway as a wordprocesser (ie, highlight text + resize or create tables onto the pages) then I could do the website myself. You would think that if you paid for the most expensive option (say vistaprint) then you would be able to operate the site in a similar fashion to word. Am I right in thinking that? I'm aware that if you get the right keywords in your site it seems to send it further up google rankings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
angie58 Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 Try one with a free trial? I know easysitesolutions who I use have a 1 month free trial... Depend what type of site you want tho I guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shef_Fitness Posted October 14, 2011 Author Share Posted October 14, 2011 Define expensive? As long as the site generates more profit than it cost to set up, then the answer has to be yes? So, if the website is transactional, then the answer is easy to quantify. If it is a 'brochure' (which ours is), you'd need to measure how many customers contacted you through your website. For us, the answer is a definite yes. As you mentioned, what is expensive? If you paid £100 for pay as you create website, and it generated one new person a week v £40 and it generate one person every 4 months, clearly the £100 option pays for itself. In my own business, my strength is the retention of the customers, however my weakness is getting the new clients in the first place. If it wasn't for retention I would have gone months ago. If I was to boost the throughput of new people, I would command the kind of numbers I used to get within gyms when I ran classes. So even though an expensive site may cost more, if it generates the new people it is cheap money Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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