Somebody gets three quotes for the same brief. One is $1,800. One is $14,000. One is $62,000. All three companies seem competent and all three can justify their number.
This is not price gouging. It is that the word website is doing far too much work.
What you are actually buying
Roughly four different products share the same name.
A presence, roughly $1,500 to $6,000
A handful of pages on a template so that people who already heard about you can confirm you exist and find your number. Nothing wrong with this. For a business getting all its work from referrals, it can be exactly right.
A credibility site, roughly $8,000 to $25,000
Custom design, real copy, proper structure, your own photography. Built to make a good impression on someone comparing you to two competitors. Most established service businesses live here.
A lead generation system, roughly $25,000 to $70,000
Everything above plus service pages built for specific searches, conversion paths, tracking that actually works, integrations with your CRM, and content designed to be found. The site is a channel rather than a brochure.
A platform, $70,000 and up
Custom functionality. Portals, calculators, booking systems, multi-location structures. Now you are buying software with a website attached.
Most disappointment comes from buying tier one and expecting tier three.
Where the money actually goes
This surprises people. On a well-run project, visual design is rarely the largest line.
- Strategy and structure. Deciding what pages exist, what each one is for, and what a visitor should do. Cheap projects skip this and it shows immediately.
- Copy. The most underfunded item in the industry. A beautiful site with weak copy does not convert, and "client provides content" is the single most common reason projects stall for six months.
- Design. Real, but usually less than clients assume.
- Build. Varies enormously with how custom the thing is.
- Photography. Frequently cut, frequently the difference between looking like a real company and looking like a template.
If a quote does not mention copy, you are not getting a website. You are getting an empty container.
How to work out your number
Start from what the site has to produce, not from what feels reasonable.
If the site needs to generate enquiries, work out what one new client is worth. If a client is worth $30,000 and the site should produce even one extra per quarter, the arithmetic on a $25,000 site is not difficult.
If the site exists so referrals can check you out, it does not need to produce anything, and spending $40,000 on it is a vanity purchase. Be honest about which situation you are in.
Questions that expose a bad quote
- Who writes the copy, and is it in this price?
- What happens to our search rankings during and after the move?
- Who owns the site and can we leave with it?
- What does month thirteen cost?
- Can I speak to a client whose site launched two years ago?
That last one is the most useful question on the list and almost nobody asks it. Sites look great on launch day. What matters is whether it was still working, and still maintainable, two years later.
The cheap option, fairly
A very cheap site is not always a mistake. For a new business testing an idea, or one with no need for the site to do heavy lifting, spending small and revisiting in two years is a sound decision.
The mistake is spending small on a site the business genuinely depends on for revenue, then spending the next three years slowly discovering what it cannot do.