In a world where your website is increasingly one of the most important tools for your business, how do you make sure you are investing wisely.  With the increasing importance of technological factors to your site and your search position, you have to consider so many other things along with just getting a good deal. In fact, many of the low cost or “free” site tools are the ones you should run away from if you do want a good experience in the long run. You can do damage to your domain and its relationship with Google by having cheap (slow) hosting as well as templated sites that are just copies of hundreds of other sites out there.

I often get asked by my clients what a good price would be for a new website or an upgrade to an antiquated one.  Unfortunately, the price can vary quite widely depending on how much you need on the back end of your site.  You can get a basic site done well for less than $1,000 if you find the right people, but if you start adding databases and logins and content management systems, you start drastically increasing the level of effort for the developer. This is why wordpress sites have become so popular as it is a platform that can be fairly end user friendly for adding content but can also be customized by a good developer to best fit your needs.

Below are just a few of the many things you need to consider: (in no particular order)

  • ease of  use for you and the site visitor
  • site speed
  • SEO tools and factors
  • schema markup
  • expandability (new producst/services/information easily added)
  • good unique content
  • mobile friendliness
  • Specificity (Don’t use one page for all of your services)

Unfortunately, like finding a good mechanic, getting a good developer is tough.  They know what is expensive and what is easy and often you don’t.  I have seen companies propose a very simple templated site that most any developer could do for over $8,000 and I’ve seen some amazingly customized and good work done for great prices. Unfortunately for many it comes down to whether they trust the developer or not.  In doing what I do, I have had the opportunity to work with many developers.  I have been brought in directly to clients where the developer is clearly taking advantage of them and I have made great new relationships with honest developers that I can see are working with the clients interest in mind.

I recently had the opportunity to work with Mirsad Capric at Answer Key on my own site redesign and I can tell you he is one of the good ones.  He is not the only good one out there, but I was very impressed with his hard work and how he worked with me.  There are a number of honest developers that I work with and I often offer a few of them to a client that asks me based on the clients specific needs. Often developers will have a specialty or certain types of sites they have had a lot of experience with.

If you do have questions on how you can make the right decision on a site, we can definitely point you in the right direction.  Please feel free to give us a shout.  We can help you with some of the important factors you need to consider as well as point you to some of the website developers like Mirsad that we have had a history with and know will lead you down the right path.  Then maybe you can give me the number of a good mechanic.