Getting a Simple Website: Why it’s Not Cheap (Part I)

“Why do websites cost so much? All I want is something simple!” This is something I hear often from potential clients of small businesses that need their first website. Given the ease to produce rather nice looking websites these days, with Wordpress and the many free or cheap themes out there, it’s a reasonable question. Why should I pay a couple hundred dollars or several thousand for something that I can get for free?

#1 – You Don’t Want Simple

Do you want your site to look like Craigslist? Chances are, even though it’s worked well for them, you have something spiffier in mind. If not, there are free tools with Microsoft and Google and Wordpress and others for creating barebone sites with little pizzazz. Some – and I’ll add them in when I review them in a future post– offer much more pizzazz. But regardless, most clients want a nice design. And often they want a unique design, until they see the costs involved with that.

On top of design, there’s ease of use. Do you want to have a non-changing website, the equivalent of a brochure? That would have worked 8 years ago, but not so well now. I bet you want a blog or some easy way to update your visitors about news. Maybe you want easy page editing. Or a Google map. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many visitors your site has? How about ads? Any nice little mashup or extra features, even if easy, are not easy, and I’ll explain why further on.

The key is, at the bare minimum, you want something that is easy to update, to which you can add photos and pages, and that looks clean and nice and reflects your own individual style.

#2 – Lots of Free Stuff, but Time is Not Free

Assuming you want a dynamic site, a site with a blog that’s easy to update and such, you could choose to go with Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or another content management system (CMS). CMSes are great, because they give you that blog and other stuff. Sometimes you can pay for a template (Wordpress has so many free and and paid templates out there, it’s amazing.) So what is the downside?

With any CMS, one downside is the initial setup. I’ve been using Wordpress and Drupal for a few years now, as well Joomla and a few others. For a site I’m working on now, I did a wireframe (a mockup) of the entire site in PowerPoint so that I would know what the navigation would be and where the text would need to go. Using this wireframe, I was able to build a 10 page Wordpress site in 8 hours time that had much – but not all – of the functionality I wanted. That is the bare minimum.

I have a few plugins that I need to find and add in. All of the user contributed plugins to Wordpress are great – like Drupal, what a great community – but unless you use the same CMS every day, you have to research the latest and greatest plugins. You have to learn them, configure them, test them. So even though 90% of the site appeared to be done within 8 hours, the last 10% may double or triple that time. Time is not free. When you leave your car at the shop all day, you hope not to pay more than $200, but you expect the damage to be much worse.

Out of curiosity, I challenged myself to build a small Wordpress site as quickly as possible. I told the client I’d do virtually nothing with content or the custom images. I used a paid template, set up an About page, a Contact page (using a plugin that I was familiar with), and a little home page content, including widgets.

How did it go? It took 16-20 hours, because I had to set up the hosting, FTP everything, find the plugins, and test it all. Not bad I thought. And really not too bad, except for one more thing: training.

#3 – Support and Training

Let’s say you develop a simple Wordpress site for someone. If you finish that site, using placeholder text, in 16-20 hours, you’re probably feeling pretty good. Maybe you didn’t do any coding even, other than tweaking a free or paid template. That’s how I felt when I got this site up and running. For a web producer in Seattle where the wages are advertised anywhere from $25 - $40/hr contracting at a company, you’re looking at $400-$800 for this commitment.

But as I already knew, it doesn’t end there. Even with something as simple as Wordpress (which is not really that simple, but is better than others), you’re looking at basic training for writing posts and pages. Add a few to several more hours. If you haven’t nailed down the requirements and what you will provide, expect a few more hours of tweaking and adding in more plug ins. Maybe the client needs help uploading a logo. What about hosting questions? Or Adsense? Etc. With this example, I stopped counting my hours after I doubled them – I was also using this opportunity to learn a few new things, so the time spent wouldn’t be accurate compared to a normal project. Regardless, this “simple” site was now well over 40 hours of my time.

And that was then. What about going forward? Rarely, if ever, does something work perfectly out of the box. Not mentioned in all of this are site upgrades, security updates, ongoing bug fixes and so on.

If You’re Looking for a Website…

It used to be that you could get by with a poor looking site, but that’s really not the case now. Although sites are much easier to build than in the past, and there are lots of goodies you can add in, it takes a ton of time to get everything working correctly, even for the whizzes.

To keep your costs down, my advice would be this:

• Don’t worry about a “unique” appearance for your site. With all of the fantastic paid and open-source templates out there, why have a shop create a new one for you? Use what’s out there, even if it’s not exactly what you want. If you can come up with some colors you like – usually easy to modify – then avoid doing a complete template. Pay someone to do your logo and go simple with the rest of the site, except for any images you’d like to add later (which should be easy).
• If you go with a CMS, study how to use it and maintain it. Wordpress has a free version at http://wordpress.com. it’s not full featured, but you can learn the basics on your own.
• Sketch out your site and be open to change. If you want a small site, you can make your own “wireframes”. Use PowerPoint or a pencil and paper. Draw exactly how you want your site to be. If you’re paying for it, why not?
• Write your own copy. Writing is another task that can often take a lot longer and cost a lot more than you’d think.
• Make sure to get technical support. Websites can be hacked or you might break it. Expect to pay for support, and make sure you know what you’re getting.
• What do you really need? Microsoft, Google and others have free site building tools. Facebook and MySpace are also a great way to get your business presence out there initially (and you should use them even after you build your site.) Wordpress has excellent free tools on Wordpress.com.

Coming up, I’ll look at some of the free tools out there to see what is good.

Update 1

I'm sold on CMSes, but they are not for everyone. However, if you want to demo what's out there, check out http://opensourcecms.com.