$5,000 Websites? Not From An Ad Agency.
Yep, I get it. Web 2.0 has changed the interactive world and participant expectations. Then again, it actually changes on a daily basis. Social networking, the blogosphere, microblogging… honestly, it could be a full time job just coming up with all the hip names of web infrastructures. All hail the mighty copywriter!
But, I digress. This post is not about the names, the latest functionality or insight into what’s coming down the pike. Instead, let’s talk about the price of a website. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, advertising agency’s sell “time” and “ideas” as a commodity. That’s the widget exchanged for compensation. There’s a lot of talk about the traditional agency model, but this is about what is happening today, in 2009. I do not claim that this post will be relevant forever, or even in a year.
Determining a fair price for the development of a website can often become a source of contention. This is because there can be be a wide range of perceived value and an unclear understanding of the effort it takes to build a great website. Even with the advent of ‘off the shelf’ CMS templates (yes, we love you Joomla), success still rests in the hands of good content, good design, good planning and ultimately, good collaboration.
I’ve noticed a trend of significantly shrinking website budgets with a major increase of functionality requirements. Yes, of course, as time goes on price efficiencies should be expected. That said, wanting to pay $5,000 for a robust website that includes all the bells and whistles such as forums, blogs, multimedia newsrooms, SEO, polls, flash, forms that integrate with a company’s internal sales software, e-commerce and a complete CMS for back end management poses a challenge for anyone wanting to be paid for their time. That’s on top of the text, photography and programming that serve as a bare minimum.
Here’s the issue: At a rate of $85 an hour (which is pretty darn low for anyone who isn’t your cousin) means that you have a grand total of 59 hours to accomplish everything. That’s 7.5 full working days. Yep, about a week and a half worth of work for one person. Considering that a typical agency would, at the very least, have a project manager, copywriter, designer and programmer assigned to it, you’re looking at each person getting just 14.75 hours to do their part. That’s less than 2 days. Uh oh.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of websites that can be developed in 59 hours. Beautiful brochure sites with limited rich media content and visitor interaction modules can be done rather quickly. It’s just a matter of the end deliverable and having a clear understanding of what it takes to get there.
Hmmm-not sure that this is really a sound argument, at least not one that carries much weight. Simply dividing up the hours and quoting an hourly rate doesn’t prove much. As a client, I try and determine what elements are worth paying for from scratch (i.e. custom-built) and which are more economical to pull off the shelf.
We approve all, well, most comments good or bad, and I hear ya that you, as a client have to determine “value”, and dividing up the needed elements. We should have stressed more about clients requesting custom databases or non off-the-shelf CMS. Next time, leave your company’s url in your post and we’ll keep the link-back active for SEO.
Good points.
Interface design and user-experience, is branding.
And like all branding, we must determine the needs of our visitors and be able to adjust the site and UI when needed.
That doesn’t happen with a template.
I’m glad I read through your post – yeah a straighforward but nice brochure site can be done for $5k (not including things like copywriting and photography). But with a project that includes the high-level list of requirements you read off you’re looking at 3-8x that even for a small agency like our with very low overhead. But it is what it is, I talk to people with $500 budgets for a brochure site and big companies with 20k budgets for 100k development projects, how it goes. Sad thing is is that very often these potential clients will go with the cheapest firm, often outsourcing development projects, and then come back to us down a chunk of change and a lot of time and frustration.
Yes, I agree that good, unique content is what can bring the value of your site up as well as a unique theme or service that your website offers. Good post.
My company works mostly on the SEO, social media side of things, and one of the frustrating things is when a companies think they can design a site on the cheap (i.e. someone’s kid using Frontpage), then they come to us and want us to drive traffic to the site. The problem is, we could drive tons of traffic to the site, but if the site doesn’t look professional are people really going to trust the company? Are they going to trust entering the payment info and actually buy something from the site? Doubtful… Unfortunately, many people drastically under-estimate the cost of good design.