COSTS - Design, Hosting, Email and Marketing

06.10.07

Filed Under: Website Profitablity

Tangible retail items always have a much easier assessment and acceptance - you see a car and it’s either within your budget or it’s not. Website Design, hosting and marketing do not work like that.  TYPES OF PRICING OPTIONS

Website Design:

  1. Per hour - most don’t like this - I wonder why. Because it’s hard to get work doing this most designers have created a per item pricing system that covers their time too. Custom design is difficult to price unless by the hour - but due to the creative process client’s tend to keep changing things based on the last pass. That’s fine, but not if the designer is not being paid for that time - and after a point (if the designer took a fee expecting the design to be 20 hours for the template) tension will ensue.
  2. Per Item - websites that are done with templates can be priced more effectively because you essentially know what the site will look like (more or less) before you hire the designer. A per template, page, gallery, photo, and other specific items can be priced each, where the designer knows that by doing so he will have enough time to get the job done.
  3. A Combination of the Two - an example of this would be $x for the first 20 hours, notifying you on hour 15 that it will take more time, and a set hourly fee thereafter.

If you’re on a budget you really should pursue template designs, as the content you enter will be custom designed into the pages of the site, but the overall look and theme are set, saving you $1,000’s and the designer can get the job done and make a profit.

Hosting:

This is the most misunderstood part of the business. Your hosting account does not need a million different items and tons of space. These are offered as a means of tricking the layperson into thinking they’re getting a lot for their money. Yes, a lot of nothing they’ll ever use. More, it is the single most important “other” element besides your website design. Hosting is nothing more than a special computer that allows for a greater # of people to access pages in your site at the same time, and also have very large lines connected you and the world to your site. Companies that charge $10 or $15 for hosting, do so because they can put 1000’s of websites in one server (the computer that hosts your site) and will do nominal work to insure the sites are ALL running fast. The problem with this is simple - if one or more sites have too much traffic it will slow the entire server down, thus serve YOUR website pages slowly and sometimes crash just like your computer does when it’s overloaded. It is estimated that the average website goes down 14 times a day - even for a few minutes - due to overcrowding and other loading issues.

Quality hosting services need a few basic things. Hosting with enough space to house your website and growth for a billion years - most sites are in the megabytes so today this is not an issue. Website Statistics you can login to see, and perhaps email where you can create email accounts with your domain (info@yourudomain.com). Email is another issue see below. Some companies allow you to access your website and change text and photos on existing pages, but usually clients screw this up and require either constant instruction which costs money, or, someone to go in and redo it. Best to leave design to the webmasters, and do your thing.

WHAT QUESTIONS/ELEMENTS SHOULD I WATCH FOR AND ASK ABOUT:

Questions to Ask:

DESIGN ELEMENTS to look for:

You will not usually get everything for Search Engine Optimizing a site - but the basics should be there, such as the above. Search Engine Optimization works to get your pages listed high for keywords related to what you offer - but it’s difficult at best and expensive. To do this correctly is very time-consuming work and a separate service.

Email Services - today due to spam issues, the major players like Yahoo, Hotmail and others, which constitute a great many clients you will have to communicate with via email, will delete or move emails into a spam folder for things like the word “free” in the subject or text! There are 100 rules, and more everyday. Email today requires services that just handle that - meaning, they are not on YOUR server, but instead on an email server being watched by technicians 24/7. A postage stamp is 41 cents… So spend $5 or $10 a month on an email account, you don’t need a gazillion emails and insure that your message gets through. In fact having one for each department in your business is better than a million. Email is never perfect but quality email services get through 98% of the time, and crappy ones 50% of the time - often you never really know if it gets there with bad services. What you really need is a personalized service where you know the company really can handle your hosting needs, that you can contact them when necessary and that they are NOT OVERCROWDING their servers. There is no need to cram a server if the fee is fair.   EXAMPLES OF SERVER FEES:

A quality server is a Dedicated Server managed by a company that does JUST THAT. Website design companies often purchase these, and the management service that goes along with it so they can monitor and have a one-on-one relationship with the company technicians who know them. A normal fee would be $700 for a 250 gigabyte hard drive although Raid Systems (dual mirrored hard drives that write back and forth to one another so if one crashes the other is up instantly), can be 1/2 the size. An average website is 100 megabytes, and can be as large as 1/2 a gig. However, dynamic sites can be more - 1, 2 even 5 gigs depending on the # of photos, the size of them, the programming that runs the store etc.  Any low cost hosting service must compromise on something - servers are not cheap, and, they require programmers to go in and write scripts to insure hackers can get in, and MANY other problems that happen every week. Don’t be cheap on hosting. Any hosting service that is under $30 is going to be a problem usually. $50 a month is fair, considering it is what runs your website. You don’t want to have to wait to speak to someone who will then read through manuals to troubleshoot issues. You get what you pay for.

Marketing:

This is a huge area but I will focus here on the most common. Google Ad Words, and Yahoo Search have approximately 70% of the world search today. They partner with a great many other major engines, and sites, and have systems and networks that reach millions of WebPages. Today they can place your ad on a website related to the theme of your ad and other avenues as well as offer keyword search results where your listing comes up. In a nutshell in the past 2 years Google has changed how you can do business online because their ad words system is effective. It’s not always cheap and you need to know what you’re doing, there are MANY parts of this puzzle that on the surface look simple, but it’s not. You need to monitor, split test, change and work ads on a regular basis to know how they are performing and what your competition is doing. This requires time, money and skill. Nevertheless, dollar-for-dollar, a quality Google Ad Words campaign can reach your market in a regional area, a state, the entire country or world market. You can budget your campaign, change your click through fees (the fee that you are charged when someone clicks on your ad), and have other controls. Similarly Google now has many other forms of advertising from being placed on Maps for the area, newspapers, radio and so on. Unless you are willing to read books on this, and test and spend $1000’s on learning this by doing it - it’s best to leave this to professionals too. In the long run you will save money, and time.

A Google Ad Campaign allows you to place keywords that you know people used last month to find what you offer and display an ad for your business / website. When they click you pay for that click - it is called a CLICK THROUGH fee. This starts at 1 cent and can be as high as $100 per click - yep. The average is between 10 cents for keywords without much competition or activity to 50 cents - $1.00 for more sought after terms.  You can cap how much you want to spend per day. The direct targetablity of this advertising method is profound - within an hour you can have people on your website seeking what you offer. However, that does not mean a sale - that is why Google is hell-bent on Relevancy - and you need to be too. Targeting keywords that really matter, ads that are catchy and direct, and a webpage that opens from that ad that sums it up, makes the offer and allows the person to EASILY buy it, call you etc. are all key factors in making those click through fees count. Fraud protection memorizes the IP address of the computer and only allows them to click 1 time per 24 hour period on any ad. So if a competitor gets mean and clicks 100 x he’s the one wasting time. You pay only once for those 100 clicks.

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Written by
John Monteleone
www.HamptonsWebDesign.com
www.HamptonsDirectory.com
631-725-5251

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