How Much Should Your Business Spend On Website Development	1.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Anand Srinivasan August 21, 2014

If you have been reading a lot of small business blogs, you might have noticed how they all emphasize on the need for businesses to have websites for what they do. There is no shying away from the fact that websites help your business get more visibility and thereby more business. More and more customers today go online to check for businesses in their neighborhood that offer products or services they want. So if you do not have a website presence, you can be rest assured that you have just lost an opportunity to get a new customer.

As a NetSuite Accounting Consultant who works freelance with small businesses, I have come across businesses with poorly done websites that did not serve a purpose, or worse, did not own a website at all. Even if these businesses realized the need for a website, one pertinent question they had was how much money should you invest in getting a business website done? There are as many agencies that build you one for $200 as there are designers who charge $6000. Besides these, there are also do-it-yourself tools that will help you build websites yourself for far less. How do you choose?

First and foremost, you must remember that building a website is much more than just the designing part. Owning a website includes hosting it on a server, maintaining it when something goes wrong, etc. Unless you are tech-savvy, these tasks may appear cumbersome and confusing. So for such business owners, it is best recommended to go for an agency that will take care of designing and hosting your website.

Let us now talk about the price. But before we get there, you should be clear about the primary reason anybody would visit your website. Let us consider you offer industrial equipments for hire to local businesses. In this case, your website visitors would be local businesses who would want to know your company phone number or know where you are located. On the other hand, if you are a florist, your customers might not just be people from your neighborhood but people from any part of the world who would want to gift flowers to someone in the neighborhood you live in. In this case, just the phone number or location would not suffice. You might want to give the visitors a 'Buy online' facility so that they may pay you over the internet and you could deliver the flowers to the intended recipient.

Once you decide on the elements of your website, decide what the 'Call to action' (CTA) should be. If you want to promote your phone number, the CTA would be something on the lines of 'Call Us Now' or 'Call Us Today'. If it's a florist shop, you could have 'Explore our gallery now' or 'Gift A Flower'. Do know that the web designers you will be talking to have a lot more experience in crafting the right CTA and design for your website. But by being aware of these elements yourself, you will be in a better position to appreciate their work.

You are now in a better position to understand the number of pages and the amount of work that is possibly needed to get your website made. Talk to your web designer and understand the effort that is required. Good designers cost a lot of money, but they are well worth the price. And depending on their per-hour charge, you could arrive at a good deal for your website.

Have you recently got a website done for your business? What has your experience been like? Share it with us in the comments.