Online Marketing

There are a lot of web designers out there that use a price per page model. There will be a separate price for a website with two pages, or with four or twenty pages plus. This is one of my pet peeves!

The reason behind this sort of pricing structure is simple although not necessarily logical.

1. To create a full bells and whistles website costs.
2. Businesses wish to pay as little as possible.
3. An entry level offering (“Websites from just €450!!!“) attracts customers.

In truth, a two page website is never going to be worth any sum of money.  You may as well give your money to your competitors instead.  This is why it is not logical to have a website like this in a pricing structure: it offers no ROI (return on investment).

Conversely, by attracting people with a low price you can then upsell them to what they actually need, which will be considerably more expensive in most cases.

The real reason that this sort of price structure gets my back up is that companies are perfectly happy to charge nearly twice the price for a 4 page website as a two page website.  This is money for nothing.  The hard work in web design is the overall look of a website.  The rest is just putting in content.  Why should somebody pay nearly the same price for two pages of content as they do for an overall website design?  It doesn’t make sense.

You may be told that a two page website will not get you results, and that the difference a 4 page brochure site would make is worth the difference in price.  Frankly, two or four pages are not much different when it comes to getting found online.

This is where the marketing comes in.

You may have a wonderful design on your small brochure website, but what good is that to you if nobody can find your site other than by typing in your actual web address?  You have to ask yourself the question “What do I want from my website?”

If the answer is that you want it to gain you business, then I cannot think of a single instance where it is enough to have a small brochure site that is not integrated with social media and is not updated regularly.  Content is king, not only because it makes better reading and because original content gets ranked on Google.  Content is also king because good content attracts links from other sites.  Those inbound links are crucial.  If your content is not good enough to get them naturally (people linking to your site by themselves), then you are going to have to create them yourself which is much harder work.  Frankly you will probably have to do this anyway at the start at least.

Pricing model ethics

Offering a price per page web design model says to me, “I’ll take your money and I don’t really care what you get for it”.  That may sound harsh and I welcome discussion from those that use that model, but I cannot see how offering anybody something that is not “fit for purpose” in most cases is even slightly ethical.

Understanding web design

Web design is complex.  In fact, the actual design work is only a small part of what it takes to create a website and market it well.  In my next post, Planning your Website, I will go into the whole process.  For now, I will leave you with this thought…..

Imagine that your business has a shop window (maybe it has).  If you could move that window to any location, where would you put it?  In Dundrum Shopping Centre, or on Shrewsbury Road?

I used Shrewsbury road example for a reason.  It may sound flash, and be well presented, but it just doesn’t have the footfall that Dundrum Shopping Centre has.

Tags: brochure websites, Content Is King!, Dundrum Shopping Centre or Shrewsbury?, Price Per Page, Two page "websites", Understanding Web Design, web designers, Web Pricing Ethics, Website Pricing, Websites from just €450 - not really

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 10:58 am and is filed under Marketing, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.