Our rates are so high because *this* guy goes through bananas like you wouldn’t believe!!

There is an old adage that goes something like “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”… and this one … “You get what you pay for!”.  Ah, the cliches are endless.

Seriously though, we get this question a lot.  There are a lot of ways to answer the question, and a lot of theories around what a website is worth. After being in the industry for about 12 years now, I believe you get what you pay for (well that’s not true if you deal with a really big over-priced agency that can demand any price they like) … AND also believe that some businesses don’t need to spend a fortune on their website!

If your business is very small, doesn’t have a huge marketing budget, or doesn’t see the web as a strategic part of the business growth, and is a strong offline business (accounting firms are a good example of this), then it’s not likely you need to invest heavily in a web presence, and can get away with having it built by a freelancer or a small agency, however be warned…

I’ve compared digital agencies and freelancers in another post.

As the owner of a mid-tier agency, I can tell you categorically that we charge what we do, to survive.  If we charged less, we’d have to provide a less superior service (and compete with the commodity end of the market), or disappear.  Here is why:

1. Experience - what a surprise huh? Building websites isn’t just about slapping together a design and crunching out a few pages of code.  Anyone that’s had a bad website built knows that there are endless amounts of pain associated with a site that has been built poorly: It doesn’t render properly in the browsers it should; hosted in an unreliable environment; CMS wasn’t setup correctly so you can’t edit all the things you should be able to; the site doesn’t appear in the search engines; it looks unprofessional; usability is poor!  We’ve learnt all these lessons the only way – the hard way!

2. Staff – you’re buying a service, not a product.  The quality of the service you receive depends solely on the quality of the staff that are providing the service.  It’s all about the people you’re dealing with.  The larger, and more professional the agency, the more talented and expensive their staff will be.  There’s a reason more experienced staff are more expensive!  It’s like choosing an accountant – if you go to an inexperienced accountant straight out of school, they’ll be cheaper, and you’ll most likely get poorer advice than from an Accountant that has been working in the field for years.  Probably not a great idea considering the difference that could make to your tax return – why make the same mistake on your website?

3. Infrastructure – Salsa has a dedicated Program Manager who’s sole responsibility is to ensure projects are run to schedule, and to the highest standards.  Our support team is dedicated purely to helping customers maintain their sites after they go live (as opposed to trying to get our developers to support client sites while they’re busy on building new ones). We also ensure the staff are well looked after – we have someone that manages the office, the beer fridge is stocked, the coffee machine is ready for our next client meeting, organises team events, & client xmas parties.  Happy staff make great websites, which makes happy customers.

4. Quality assurance – about 3 years ago we heard a story from a client of ours that had a website built by another agency, which was lost about 90% way through the build cycle.  They had a server problem, and the site that had been worked on for 3 months, disappeared over night – no backup, no copy on a local machine. Nothing. They had to start from scratch.  More professional agencies have backup systems, version control mechanisms, project management tools, development-production synchronisation processes, testing infrastructures… the list goes on.

5. ROI – a site that doesn’t return any customers isn’t a lot of value.  There is a LOT to learn about creating websites that work.  From design (read Blog posts from our Creative Director to appreciate how important good design is – yet another example of amazing staff) to prominence in the search engines, to integration with back-end sales systems – they’re all important aspects of creating websites that work.  It’s not too hard to do the math on what a good website will return for you when compared with other marketing medium, but it’s futile if the site isn’t built with ROI in mind.

6. Your professionalism online – this may sound pretentious, but have you ever driven a BMW, then gotten into a Hyundai?  Not that Hyundai’s are bad cars – I actually think they’re exceptional value for money, but you’d obviously notice the difference in quality and experience if you had the M3?.   If your potential clients look at your Hyundai website, and your competitors BMW website, who do you think they’ll choose?  We’ve found that making a BMW quality website, while more expensive, ends up returning far more to customers in leads, inquiries and sales, and so we focus on delivering quality websites that sell.

BUT I JUST WANT A WEBSITE – WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?!

Here is how you can decide – checkout the portfolio of the providers. Are they of the quality you would like?  Are they BMW’s or Hyundai’s?  Are their customers of a similar size/level of professionalism to you?  Maybe even call a couple of the customers – get some honest feedback.

Bottom line, if you get a price that is considerably lower, you should expect a compromise on some or all of the above.  That doesn’t mean you can’t get a cheaper website, but (wait for the Cleche) “You get what you pay for!”.  When ever we compete against agencies of a similar size to us, the prices are always comparable.

When we compete against smaller agencies, they’re always cheaper.  The clients that understand the difference, are the ones that we love to work with.

First thing to mention, is that it’s not often I see a business succeed with little or no money invested to get things started.  However it usually takes someone at least one try to learn this truth – and hopefully this Blog post will help save some time and pain in that learning process.

I always recommend engaging a professional agency (like us) to help execute a web project, as it’s often an important part of getting a new business up and running successfully.  This article is aimed at those that don’t want to spend that sort of money, and instead are looking for a cheap & nasty solution to help get them started.  Salsa doesn’t provide these services, but here is what we’ve learnt over the years.

Sorry I know it sounds cynical.

Once you’ve taken care of the paperwork (register a business name – https://online.justice.vic.gov.au/cav/br-home, and register your domain name – Google “cheap domain names”), you need to get a website built.

If you have $1,000 – $2,000 to spend on a website.

The cheapest way to get this done is to use a pre-existing Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, or Joomla, or Magento or OSCommerce for an eCommerce website.  You should then look to download free, or buy a template for the site, instead of paying for a custom design.

Some places to get templates from:

WordPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Joomla – http://www.joomlashack.com/

Magento – http://www.silverthemes.com/

www.templatemonster.com is also a source of hundreds of themes, but the quality is inconsistent.

Once this is done, you need to then get someone to build it for you.  www.nachomedia.com.au can help put together a template website at low cost.  Or if you know a freelance developer, have them do it for you – should be around $1,000 for a WordPress/Joomla site, and $2,000 for an Magento/OSCommerce site.

They can probably help you with hosting also.

Credibility is important – so perhaps set up a 1300 number if you can – and have it direct to your mobile phone or land line – makes you look more professional, and doesn’t cost much.

If you have nothing to spend on a website!

Try setting up a Facebook page.  It costs nothing. See this post on how to do that: http://lazarus.salsainternet.com.au/2010/06/howwhy-to-create-a-facebook-page/

Take a look at Twitter also, if you have the time.

You can also redirect your domain name to your facebook page if you want to advertise the domain name, instead of the facebook page in your marketing collateral.

Get people to find you.

Once you’ve setup some sort of online presence as above, people need to find it.  To be honest, this is often the hardest part.

First, you should run a Google Adwords campaign (ads on the right side of a Google search results screen), as this is relatively low cost, and works instantly – you can setup a campaign, and get it running in a couple of hours – gets traffic to your site immediately.  You can check keywords, etc  at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can also read about how to setup a campaign here: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/adwords-explained.html

Once you’ve proven the model works online, you can start to work on getting the site to rank well in the free/organic listings in Google (left side of Google search results screen).  There are 3 things that make this work – Structure, Content & Links. More info on how this works here: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/search-engine-optimisation.html

You also want to put your web address on your business card, flyers, email signature, etc to help get the word out.

As mentioned, this approach in my opinion is speculative at best, but costs very little, so maybe it’s worth a shot for those that haven’t tried before.

Good luck!

As a digital agency, we often take over projects for clients that have previously been handled by a freelance designer/developer, and find us regularly coming across the same reasons for the switch.  It’s important to note, however that for some businesses, I believe it is a good idea to actually use a freelancer instead of a digital agency to save money.

It’s fairly obvious I suppose, but sometimes, freelancers are a good choice for sole operators, or businesses with smaller budgets.  They have much lower overheads, so can charge lower rates.  It’s important you’re aware of all the pros/cons of such relationships however.

Nimble – often a freelancer can be quite nimble in the way they operate – you get to deal directly with the operator/owner/designer.  Changes can often be accommodated easily, and work is done quickly (as long as they’re not working on too many projects at once).

Pricing – as I already mentioned, freelancers typically charge lower rates as they have lower overheads such as office expenses, project managers, marketing, etc.  You just want to make sure they’re highly experienced, so costs down blow out later (look for a fixed price quote, with a detailed inclusions list).

Support – some freelancers are able to provide really good support if they’re easily accessible.  If your freelancer has too many projects on the go, you may find that the support is poor, or non-existent.  A digital agency may also suffer the same problem, so it’s important to ensure they have a dedicated support infrastructure to provide the help when you need it.

Expertise – obviously using a freelancer means that you’re limited to the expertise of one person.  This may be suitable if you’re after a good designer only, or just an SEO expert, for example.  If you’re after a provider that can provide strategic input, a wider range of design skills (often they’ll employ more than 1 designer), online marketing expertise, larger scale development expertise (in case your business grows rapidly), high-end technical support, then you should consider using an agency.

Stability – freelancers sometimes disappear.  A large number of the new customers we get from freelancers are the result of them disappearing into an agency, or taking a ski trip to Canada.  This can sometimes mean your site disappears, or you suddenly have no support.   Agencies can also disappear, but if you do a little research, and you see that they have a load of happy customers, have been around for a few years, and the owners have a stake in the day to day running of the business, then you should be OK.

Contactable – Agencies are often a lot more contactable than freelancers, with a team of people that can usually help you.  Freelancers may be in meetings, working on an urgent new project, or just too busy!

In summary, freelancers may be suitable if your business is very small/not well funded, if the web is not a huge part of your business strategy, your business is in an experimental phase, or your company has an internal infrastructure to manage the freelancer.  Otherwise, go with an agency.

Consider all of the above, and make a decision that best suits your business.