The question comes up almost every week. A customer wants a new website and one of the first questions is: "what does it cost? A very understandable question, you don't just give a blank cheque, you want to know in advance where you stand. But yes, what does a new website cost?
We ourselves often make the comparison with a car. What does a new car cost? The prices of new cars are gigantic. For less than 10K you have a Hyundai i10, for 50K an Audi A4 and for 3,400K a Bugatti Chiron. What do you expect from the car in terms of technical specifications, does it just have to be solid or does it also have to look good or is it especially fast? Do you want to stand out with it or can it blend in with the crowd?
As with cars, there are websites that cost a few hundred euro and sites that cost millions. For the price of a Hyundai, you cannot expect Bugatti performance.
Every site is customised, and so is every price tag.
Nowadays you have beautiful template websites with complete CMS systems behind them that you can download for a few tens of euros from sites like ThemeForest, Elegant Themes or Template Monster. Or you can use SquareSpace or WIX to create something yourself. If you are short on time or budget, this will help you out a lot. The fact that thousands of other companies use the same template does not matter much in some industries. Optimisations in terms of findability or speed are often not possible, but when your company does not need to rely on internet traffic, it does not matter. Fine for the baker on the corner.
The baker on the corner is mainly busy baking bread and selling bread. He sees the website only as a cost item. His years-old website may not be responsive, but it still works. He has no idea how many visitors he gets to his site and probably even less of an idea of how many visitors he is losing.
A fellow baker has had a custom site made with a little more functionality. Companies can order their sandwiches online for meetings or for lunch. Suddenly, findability is much more important. Online, people from all over the city can find him, instead of just people from his neighbourhood. Not only his orders, but also his name recognition and the number of online reviews go up. The site is intertwined with his business model and has become a source of income instead of a cost item.
If you have measurable goals, multiple target groups or requirements in terms of speed, findability, visitor flow, specific design wishes, specific functionalities or if you want to link your site to a CRM or HRM package, a template website will soon no longer be sufficient. In all these cases, a custom website is your best option. If you don't want your site to be full of third party plugins: custom website. You want a website that is completely focused on your house style: custom website. You want to be able to call someone if something doesn't work after an update, you guessed it: custom website.
How much a custom site costs depends very much on how much time it takes. After all, it is an hourly business. It starts at a few thousand euros, but can quickly run into tens of thousands of euros. Do you need to design and build three different page types or are there twenty-five of them? Design and construction alone are often not enough. At least as important as the site itself is the content. After all, that's what customers come for, what you can be found on, what makes people stay, come back or recommend you to others. The time that goes into creating catchy images, cool illustrations, clear infographics, trendy films and, last but not least, texts, on which you can be found, is often underestimated. Texts that are easy to find and still enjoyable to read.
And then you have the group of websites that will really get into trouble. These are the sites for the big boys with very specific functionalities and requirements, such as banks, governments, but also clubs like Thuisbezorgd, TUI, Philips and Coolblue. In terms of design, it does not even have to be that spectacular, but the sheer size and technical requirements make it enormously complex. These are platforms that are continuously developed by entire teams of developers. In many cases, they have an internal development department, but if you add up all the hours, these are still sites that cost millions.
To use the car comparison again... a car costs x amount when new and will subsequently decrease in value. As soon as you leave the showroom, it is already worth a few thousand euros less. A site can increase in value. How much is the Coolblue site worth? Partly due to the investments in marketing, it is worth many times more than just how much it cost to make. It has gained brand value, name recognition, reliability, a high Google ranking and recurring visitor flow. In addition, the site provides an awful lot of market information which they can use to improve their earnings model every day.
With Internet companies, the site is worth everything. Without sites, they are nothing. That does not mean that it should cost everything, after all, it is still a business.
It is perfectly possible to measure and understand what a site yields. Sometimes this is in euros but often not. A goal of your site could just as well be to provide customers with better information. Every download of a manual can be an achieved goal and can save a service employee 5 minutes on the phone. Filling in a contact form, but also registering an applicant can be a goal. Once you know what your goals are, you can formulate an online strategy and set up a site that is entirely geared towards them. Every site is customised, and so is every price tag.
The most important question to ask yourself is: what role does the website play in my business process? Once you know how important the site is for your business, compare it to the cost of, say, a company car. Where would you rather put your money?
We can no longer ignore it. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. Midjourney, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, all exciting developments that make the terms "creativity" and "originality" increasingly difficult to define.
Do you want to look as sexy as a creative bastard? Now you can! For the fans, we have come up with some merchandise of our own. Not only because we love making it ourselves, but also because as far as we're concerned, anyone can be a bastard (as long as we don't have to pay you a salary). Would you like to be a bastard too?
As full as the plane was on the way out, so was our programme for the three days. After a short flight, we set foot on Scottish soil in Edinburgh and met our very own local BOB; Ross.
Parkweg 55, 7545 MT Enschede, the Netherlands.
