We often get enquiries about new website builds, mostly from small to medium sized businesses with no previous experience in this dealing with a web or design agency and the first thing they ask is how much is this going to cost.

This is expected and not surprising either as just like us, most small businesses don’t have massive cashflows so cost is a big part of it and it genuinely needs to be considered and we respect that.

This series of articles will hopefully provide some insight into the process of building a new website that will actually work for you and your business and not just be a nice looking, expensive online brochure.

What is it going to cost?

Honestly, how long is a piece of string… There’s no way to give an accurate cost without knowing all the details and its going to be unique for every situation. This is article is about trying to explain what influences the cost and why its important to not simply go for the cheapest option.

Cheap in the website world generally means slapping something together quickly with very little care and attention to detail and the things that actually make the website perform. It’s precisely these things we want to point out to you so you have a better understanding of what they are and why you need them cos often it’s what you are not told about that actually matters.

It’s easy to make things cheap by neglecting some of the things that matter because it takes time to set them up and if no-one tells you, you are not actually going to know so leaving them things out makes it cheaper and the website will still look great when you see it, its just that the underlying additional services are not supporting the new website to make it work as well as it could be.

There are a lot of additional things you need to do alongside building your new website to make it all come together. I always say, it’s never one thing that gives you results, it’s the combination of lots of little things that brings it all together.

What you’re probably missing out on

Your website needs to be registered with search engines so they know you exist, know where you are and what category of business you belong to and what pages are on your website.

Setting up traffic analysis so you can see how many visits your site is getting, what pages they are visiting, and identifying the keywords people are using and where you are averaging for those keywords on Google etc.

Setting up Google Business listings and applying all your company information, opening hours, photos and reviews. These all help with search visibility and also provide its own data and metrics around its use.

Applying the search engine optimisation to your website pages and the titles and descriptions that people see when search results are displayed. When someone types in a search query and 2 options come up and 1 is poorly written and configured, which one do you think the person will click on?

Additional security and performance is something that is often left out and this is almost always due to a complete lack of knowledge in how to apply it. You can leverage browser caching to speed up page loading, apply additional security to pages, directories and login screens etc as you would be surprised how often websites are attacked with people trying to access your server.

Cheap shared hosting from overseas provides very restricted access to the parts of the server where you can leverage a lot of performance and additional services that make a website better, faster and more secure. We run our own private VPS cloud server based right here in NZ that gives us complete control right down the operating system of the server.

Each of the topics above could have their own article written about them and the purpose of this is not really to go into the details of each one, however we are more than happy to discuss these with you as each situation is unique and requires a slightly different approach.