In the first part of this series, How Much Does a Web Site cost?(Spoke8, New Link?) You could seesurface that complexity drives up cost, and simplicity lowers it. But that’s not always the case. Simplicity in style, architecture and user interface is often incredibly complex under the hood, so to speak, and as mysterious as what goes on under the hood of your car, it can be expensive to build.
In the case of the car example, for most people, their vehicle – at an average price of about $20,000 for a new car – is the second largest purchase they’ll make. But when you break that down into it’s UTILITY, it’s really a bargain! After all, you get to drive your car to get you everywhere, every day. If you keep that vehicle for 10 years (excluding gas and maintenance) the cost per month of having that convenience is $166. That’s pretty inexpensive!
What about the utility of your web site? Your site should be the hub of your organzation’s operations – from sales and marketing (what we traditionally think of web sites as for) to
operations (functionality like apps that customers can use), to HR, to entertainment and engagement (social media hubs.) So that $10,000 web site over the 2-3 years (sorry, they just don’t last as long as cars before some disruptor technology shifts the landscape) has a monthy utility of $277. What’s it worth to your organization to engage a customer, delight a client, sell your product or service for $9 a day?
If you’re selling $5 items, your web site is probably driving more high-volume sales, but it’s still possible to make that daily utility in sales quite easily.
If you’re selling $100,000 services, your web site serves a very different function. Yet many high-dollar-value services companies have sites that don’t cost more than $10,000 or $20,000, but their utility is still $9 (or $18) per day. Even at $50,000 or more for a site with complex tools and features for customers to use, this utility is less than the cost of acquiring just ONE client, and works 24/7/365 for several years.
And if your client is like everyone else, they checked out your site before they returned your sales call. So they have a perception about the quality of your services based only on your web site presence. That’s some pretty powerful utility.
When factoring in the price of your web site, take into consideration the utility value of your web site, not just the price tag at the bottom of the proposal.
If you’d like to know more about what your site should include, check out the 25 Must Haves for every organization to consider when looking to revamp your site.
