From time to time, clients ask me about marketing agencies or web development firms that offer extremely low rates for website development. For example, their claim might be: Unlimited pages, not a template site, only $99 a year!
Two things come to mind when I hear this. First, assuming the client doesn’t have to do all the work themselves, how much time can be allocated to help them with their website? If there is a phone call to review goals, target market and basic website needs that lasts about an hour, then a few modest hours for selecting images, colors, esthetics, adding and laying out content and integrating a logo, let’s say that adds up to 10 hours of time (that doesn’t include testing, billing, collection and hosting). Does that mean this company is paying their people $10 per hour, or less, since the company needs to make at least a modest profit.
The second thing that comes to mind, is that ten hours is, or at least should be, insufficient for the creation of a professional business website. Call to actions, integrated blogs and blog feeds, industry news feeds, search engine optimization, keyword density, pull quotes, font selection, header tag selection, sharing “chiclets”, social media marketing integration, custom images and branding should be both utilized and optimized for a professional website, whether your business is an insurance agency, broker, law firm, consulting organization of high tech firm. And lastly there is coding, preferably using PHP/WordPress to ensure optimum compatibility and flexibility. So how can you do all this for $99 (or even $1,000)? It would seem that answer is clear, either very little time is invested – or really low wages are paid (or some combination of both). You don’t need to be a math major to figure out that equation.
For Web Marketing best practices go to StartUpSelling for Insurance Agency Marketing or JurisMarketing for Law Firm Web Marketing.
