DIY or professional?
The first question to ask yourself is: do you have the time to figure this out for yourself and can your business afford the time it will take you to learn from your mistakes? For most businesses, getting it wrong ultimately costs more than getting it right first time with expert help; if you don’t have the in-house expertise to deliver a successful website, the best option will be to engage the expertise of professional website design company.
Choosing your web professional
There are lots of website design companies out there, so how do you choose the right one for you and your needs? You criteria should include a company that will take time to understand your business in detail; someone who wants to understand what is required for your business to succeed. But they also need to have the experience to be able to look at your business afresh with both an expert eye and a customer’s perspective of the goods and services you may provide.
Building a successful relationship with your web professional
You will want to make sure you spend sufficient time with this company to ensure they don’t just understand what you want , but are also in a position to make valuable recommendations on what you need to take your business where you want it to go.
This cannot be accomplished in a couple of hours’ worth of meetings. To get this right, the level of effort required is considerable and additional research will be conducted outside your meetings. So once you find a web professional you feel comfortable with, you should be prepared to account for this time as part of the overall project cost, which takes us onto….
You also need to have a sensible budget for the project.
As a general rule of thumb (and every business is different), you should look to spend about 5% of your turnover on marketing to keep you where you are and around 10% for a steady increase of turnover. This cost will be spread across all of your marketing; however, if you take into account that a website project will last for 3-4 years, the investment should be spread across that time.
So, for a business turning over £500,000 with a target of £750,000, a sensible figure for their marketing budget would be £50,000 (ie 10% of their turnover). Depending upon who their customers are and which channels are an effective means of reaching them, this figure might then be split into the following areas:
- Website Design & Development 20% £10,000 (£30k every 3-4 years)
- Events & Offline Marketing Ads 30% £15,000
- Search Engine Optimisation 10% £5,000
- Email and Content Marketing 20% £10,000
- Online PPC. 20% £10,000
Having a sensible expectation of cost before engaging with your web professional will help you find the right company to create a website that will deliver real ROI for your business.
