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.

I had a meeting today with a potential new customer, and they were just getting out of a bad relationship with their previous developer.  They mentioned that he’d “oversold” them on the capabilities of his organisation.  In fact, he didn’t even have an organisation – it was only 1 person.  His website, and the way he presented his business, made it appear as though it was a more substantial business.  Anyway, it turns out he’s going on a long holiday, and their site is supposed to have gone live in 2 weeks, and is not near ready… needless to say, they’re now looking for a new developer!

I  guess the point I’m making in a round about way, is that your site can be used to allow people to see who you are (in the above example he was lying, but let’s assume you won’t do that!).  It’s not only my opinion, but I’ve seen it time and time again – if your website visitors can see who you are, what your team is like, and get a feeling of comfort that they’re dealing with real, honest, people, your enquiries will go through the roof.  Not only that, the quality of the enquiries will be considerably better.

E.g. We run a marketing site using another brand name (email me if you want to know what it is).  This particular site is a brand that only generates leads for Salsa – there is no real business behind it.  The site itself ranks its butt off in the search engines – gets twice as much traffic as the Salsa site, however the leads are generally very bad in comparison.  There are about the same number of leads (in fact maybe even more) but they are much, much lower quality, and equate to about 5% of our sales, while the Salsa site generated about 40%.  I butted my head against the wall for years trying to work out why, and one day a client actually told me – after mentioning they’d actually come across the other site, but decided not to enquire; I asked why they did choose to enquire with us?

Their response was “because I felt like I was dealing with real people.  The other website didn’t look real”.  The site itself is as well designed as the Salsa site, however it does not contain any people – no staff page, no photo’s of clients, not even a stock photo of one of those ladies you see on every 2nd website!  Nothing that gives the user the feeling they’re dealing with real people, and so they don’t have any confidence, and don’t waste their time enquiring.

Get your staff onto your website, and watch your enquiries improve.

Here is our staff page: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/about-salsa-staff.html

After all these years, all the good times, all the weeks without water, and being left at the old office all alone in the dark for weeks.  After all the times we’ve joked about not being able to kill Lazarus, not even with weed killer… Lazarus is dead.

And can you believe after all that, he died because we over watered him? WTH! Anyway, Lazarus was famous for sitting in the corner, observing life in the Salsa office.  This blog was named in is honour.

You can read more about Lazarus on the Salsa staff page.

We’ll get another plant – there will never be another Lazarus, but we’ll call her the same name anyway.

Hopefully by reading this Blog you’ll learn all about the things Lazarus learnt about web design & development and the murky waters of online marketing while he observed quietly from the corner of the Salsa office.

Happy reading,

Adam.