The Economics of Websites, Is Your Website a Profitable Affair?

  • Date Published
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Website design and development calls for a tug of war between quality and cost. Which side should you support? While keeping a tab on your expenses is important, focusing on quality features and tools gets you the real ROI.

Gone are the days when a website served as a “Good to Have” decorative value for business with basic functionality and boring interface. Switch to present and the website has transformed into a “Mean Marketing Machine” to generate traffic, leads and ultimately customers. It has to create lasting impression with stunning outlook and interactive features.

Website expenses budgeting issues

When Would You Call Your Website a Profitable Investment?

Choose your answer:

    A) When you generate a decent looking low-cost version with basic functionality without the aesthetic frills. Less expenditure, less risk approach.
    B) When you generate a website that is high on user experience and social integration. Upfront high cost for quality benefits later approach.

There are many individuals, start-ups and small businesses that easily opt for answer “A” as they are on bootstrapped budgets and have other business priorities to attend. But the option that makes sense if you are there for the long run, is definitely “B” as it is not only a good strategy but also covers up the investment cost sooner or later with steady flow of business and client nurturing.

What Affects the Cost of Website?

The Website Costing is dependent on multiple factors that should be accounted for in your budget-planning phase. Apart from the approximate ball-park figure that you have in mind for website design, consider the following inputs that add-up to your existing budget:

  • Need for features and components: This includes the number of pages, videos, events, slide show or photo gallery with content categorization along with the stress on overall look and feel of the website. The more demanding you are as a client with the website specifics, the more it translates into costing as it demands revisions and designers’ time and resources
  • Need for bells and whistles: In today’s digitally social times, websites need to be highly responsive and customizable with content management system, blogs, social links, feeds, SEO, online strategy, lead engagement, maintenance, back up services and many other peripheral services that add to the overall user experience of your customers
  • Expertise level of Web Designer: This particular factor has a massive impact on the websites that click and the ones that totally trash. The designers, who have a reputed name in your location or offer exceptional support service over Skype and other platforms, should make to your shortlist. It is better to pay hefty sum to an experienced designer who understands his craft and your industry rather than one who charges peanuts and puts you doldrums.
  • Your business size: The magnitude of your business has a direct impact on the total costs for your website design with different price range for startups, non-profits, SMEs, Mom & Pop shops and large multinational corporations. This difference is due to the ability of each of these business to spare budgets as well as the purpose they need to serve through their website. Of course, the features and content requirement also vary, leading to very individualistic costing methods for different business segments.

Addressing the “Elephant in the Room” – Why You Need to Spend More for a Website?

A website for any business is the ideal platform to attract new customers, engage the existing ones and give a glimpse as to how the products/services offered are superior over other players. With such an important task to be accomplished, Websites better be made by experts to lend it professional touch and productive worth.

Elephant in the room cartoon from mark anderson

Here are few critical reasons that defend the case for better (and sometimes “over”) budget for effective website design:

  • Generates ‘meaningful’ ROI: There is distinct difference in the earnings that you can expect from a novice-looking site and the one that has many ways to capture leads and generate sales. A basic website might get you $2-$3 (or probably nothing, if its too basic) for every $1 invested, while a well designed and interactive site through its content and features like landing page may reap $9-$10 for every $1 invested. This makes it a strong premise to forgo short-term gains in form of cheap websites in lieu of long-term steady ROI.
  • Allows integrations and customizations: One of the biggest advantages of shelling out extra money on your website is the ability to have integrations with 3rd party apps, social media, in-house/cloud software like CRM and tons of content and format customizations. This flexibility makes way for solid relationship building with target audience both old and new, with insightful and real time information captured through website features
  • Improves the credibility quotient of business: Making right first impression is always important. As per a survey report from Kenesis, 75% of users judge your business’ credibility from your website’s design. A sophisticated looking yet easy to navigate interface, winning user experience and clear answers/solutions for queries/problems of qualified leads and prospects helps to set your website apart from the rest. All this for some well-spent monies that you will never regret parting with.
  • Gets you noticed: A website with SEO optimized content and options to add relevant, industry-specific content from time to time with social presence helps to climb up the ranks in Google and Bing Search engine ranking. This makes you easyily accessible to the audience that matters. A good website also gets talked about among customer circles both online as well as off it. So make most of the opportunity to nail the website design.

The Key to Successful Website Design Is to Know and Distinguish between Things That Are:

  • Critical viz. a. viz nice to have and
  • Those that need to be implemented right away viz. a viz. those that can be built-in later.

Are you ready to earn lucrative returns from your business website? Allow us to helm this dynamic task with latest tools and insights in website design/redesign.