One of the key decisions when shopping for a website is value for money. You can pay from as little as a couple of hundred euros to tens of thousands of euros. One thing to be careful of is understanding that the terms ‘value for money’ and ‘cheap’ are very different things.
All websites are not equal in the same way that all cars are not equal. If you were in the market for a reliable & safe family car, you wouldn’t open up a search engine and type in ‘Cheap cars for sale’. I think most people would have a fair idea on what makes and models they had in mind and this would shape their budget. So if you want a brand new German jeep, you’ll have different expectations and search parameters than if you wanted a second hand family saloon. You’ll see the difference between both – shapes, colours, comfort, technical features, power etc.
The same tells aren’t necessarily visible in a website. So when it comes to a website (and let’s stay with the car theme here), you may be in the market for nice new Mondeo but if you don’t ask the right questions, you could easily buy a 15 year old Fiesta that has 4 bald tires, a rusting engine and no NCT!
Our Google Analytics traffic shows that one of the top search terms of inbound traffic to our website is ‘cheap websites’ or variations on that phrase. If you’re in the market for a cheap website, you’ll get just that and as long as you understand that, there’s no problem. If however you want to engage and impress visitors to your site, if you want to turn visits into enquiries and sales, if you want to stand out from your competitors – cheap is not a good look.
Part of the problem is that the web design business is completely unregulated. You don’t have to have any formal qualifications to call yourself a web designer. Anybody can put together a website without understanding the code that makes it work and hang together (HTML, CSS & JavaScript) using generic tools and themes. So it may look good at first glance but problems could exist underneath the surface. Problems such as :-
- Poor page layout
- Poor mobile experience
- Poor underlying HTML & CSS code resulting in bad search engine results
- Spelling mistakes
- Bad choice of colours
- Bad choice of key phrases and headings
- Lack of call to action buttons
- Failure to submit sitemap to Google
- Lack of SSL cert
- Poor password protection
- Second rate hosting
- Lack of website backups and automatic updates
- Lack of documentation
- Lack of support post go-live
- Not screen reader friendly
- Readability issues for people affected by colour blindness
- Lack of a search function
- Images not optimised for web
- Lack of a valid privacy policy
- Not GDPR compliant
- Use of illegal (unlicenced) stock images
- Failure to include appropriate cookie warnings
- Failure to use recapcha on all contact forms
- Lack of Analytical data
So ‘cheap’ websites can be bad news in the long run if any of the points above are important to you. By the same token of course, paying a lot of money for a website is no guarantee of a good result either.
The phrase that I come back to time and time again is value for money. A €200 website in the long run could turn out to be far more expensive if you’re losing sales because of it especially if you’re in a high value business. So when you are website shopping you need to ask (and sticking with the car analogy!), how many miles does it do to the gallon? i.e. does it enhance the reputation of your brand or business, will it translate into sales, is it a differentiating factor between you and your competitors?
At ClearSoft we offer value for money websites. Our packages start at €500 and use a modular pricing system so you can pick and choose addons and features that are important to you. We can’t guarantee that your website will transform your business (nobody can do this, there are too many variables), but we can guarantee a quality product that looks beautiful, built with creativity on a solid platform that will support your business ambitions and develop as your business does.
