It’s accepted as fact these days that if you want your business to thrive, then the absolute bare minimum it needs is a quality website. There are a lot of areas in business where you can cut back on your spending and gloss over shortfalls – but if your website isn’t fit for purpose, you’re off to a bad start from which there might be no coming back.
This is all the more galling if you’ve paid good money for the privilege of having your shiny new website. Your site is the first thing most customers will see with a connection to your business. In many ways, it’s your public face – so you’re going to want people to like what they see. That’s the minimum you might expect for the amounts – some verging as high as £5,000! – that some web design companies will charge to create a website for you. So… how much is a fair price for web design?
It’s often said that “you get what you pay for”, but how true is this statement, especially when it comes to web design? For a lot of service users out there, it bears little resemblance to the reality. That’s why it’s essential to know what you want from a website and ensure that any service you are paying for understands what it is you’re looking for. When you’re seeking the best service for pay monthly web design, you can only be confident of getting value for money if you have a firm idea of what you need from a website, and have communicated this to any provider.
For example, if you imagine that you can commission a website, and watch it top the Google rankings the moment it goes live; that’s not the way search rankings, work and it never has been. Even the best pay monthly websites take a while to get searched, for their quality to be assessed, and for them to start appearing on the top search result pages. Only a skilled web designer with an in-depth understanding of Search Engine Optimisation can help you achieve this – but more importantly, they’ll tell you honestly how they’ll go about it, and how long it will take.
The question of how much you should pay for Web design is somewhat of a red herring – in general, it depends what you can afford, what you are willing to pay, and what you need from your site. Certainly, for a small one-off fee, you can’t expect a site that looks amazing, and which pulls in more traffic than one for which you would hire a pay monthly website design company. However, even if you’re forking out a lot of money for your site, you need to know and communicate clearly to providers, what you are looking for.
Getting the best website, then, isn’t a matter of how much you pay – or at least, not only that. If you do your research and communicate clearly with providers, then you can have realistic expectations on what they can do for you – and be sure that you’ve got value for money!