You can pay less than $500 to create a website. However, is it going to be a website that represents you and your brand well?
You can pay less than $500 to create a website. After hosting fees, a domain name, plugins/themes, and maybe a few add-on services you may even be able to do it for under $300 depending on your chosen platform. However, is it going to be a website that represents you and your brand well? Face it, if you aren’t a designer, storyteller, or flow doctor (I just made that up) then creating your own website can be a daunting task. Or maybe even worse, you may think you have a great site that is in fact not presenting to customers near as well as you think it is.
Spending the time to make it look right, sound right, or send someone through the right funnels to convert is probably not the best use of your time. Honestly, your time is more valuable than that. What reasons are there for avoiding building a site yourself or outsourcing the work for a few thousand dollars to the web guy down the street?
We have put together four reasons that paying for your website monthly and using the concept of Websites as a Service is powerful, can save money, free up cash, and relieves you from the stress of building a website yourself.
You can spend thousands of dollars on the design phase alone of a new website. Many small business sites run in the $3k to $15k range and can be much more than that depending on the needed features. You pay up front and then in installments throughout the project and you then yourself with a monthly maintenance plan and hourly rates that can stack up quickly. You now have an awesome product but not the support or customer service you were hoping for. Your cash flow is depleted and your options are limited when it comes to investing in other revenue generating opportunities for the business. Your traditionally built site now has to create leads, generate revenue, and convert customers but is now in a “set it, and forget it” mode.
Don’t hear us wrong here, there are definitely times when the traditional site build is absolutely the right approach. However, if cash flow is a concern and a tighter timeline is needed then another approach may be better suited for your circumstances.
Your time is valuable! No! Really… it is. What do you think your time is worth… $30, $40, $100 dollars per hour? What do you want it to be worth? Determine how much your time is worth and factor that into your decision when choosing whether an expenditure is the right call or your time is better spent elsewhere. Factoring what it would have cost you if you were paying yourself is a valid way to understand the costs of a project. If you can build your site in 50 hours and your time is worth $50 an hour you can have a $2000 site, but what did it keep you from achieving in the meantime? Does it represent the brand and company well? Does it look how you want? More importantly, does it look like your customers want? Can they trust it? Will they trust it? What are you losing while you spend your valuable time building your own website? Sales, relationships, increase in audience, content creation, etc. When building your own site your sanity will be tested with all the seemingly “easy” tasks that are part of building a site. Your time should not be spent figuring out why there is so much white space between your logo and the top of your hero image or why that font won’t load properly.
If you can achieve more revenue generating activities away from web creation we highly recommend valuing your time and knowledge of your product, service, or business in a different way and let experts handle the things you shouldn’t be working on.
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Can you learn how to build a website? Yes. Absolutely. In a six months time you may have the knowledge to rebuild your site in half the time, with less frustration, and a better result. However, there is a lot to learn… design, layout, graphic tools, basic HTML and CSS, copywriting, SEO, hosting, DNS, and more. See the time stacking up? Maybe you are good at one or two of these but the chances of you doing all of these well is pretty slim. Why try and be an expert when companies are out there with collective experience that exceeds your age… and probably by a lot. In the case of websites and providing an excellent experience to your customers, teams can be invaluable… even small teams.
Finding a team that listens well and takes the power of their collective knowledge and puts it behind even a simple website can make a massive difference. Something that would take you an hour may take them five minutes. Sourcing the perfect image could take the afternoon whereas the resources and familiarity of a designer's eye will only take them minutes to capture your story better than you may have imagined. Yield to the experts and lean on them hard!
Moving to a WaaS (Website as a Service) model for your website may be a new concept but for many companies it is the right call until their business or company has proven itself and the website is ready to be invested in as an asset. Why dump a huge amount of capital into your site before you have made a sale or achieved a conversion? Remove some of the risk and free up cash flow so that you can focus on other revenue generating activities. Your site will be working for you while paying your monthly fee instead of you forking over a huge chunk of capital that you may spend the next two to three years paying off.
So that’s it, that wraps up just a few reasons why building your own site may not be the right choice for you, your brand, or your team. We want to introduce you to the Always Fresh model. Always Fresh is one of the very first WaaS models that works for you and is risk free. Let us build your site and for a monthly fee of $298, or a little more if you want an e-commerce store. We will assign a dedicated project manager and designers to your build. Your site will be up and running in less than a month. Want to change the imagery out monthly? No problem. Use your 2 hours of monthly support to make swap images, have us add pages, or tweak content. We will be making suggestions and recommendations all along the way. Want to invest more… we have you covered there as well with various add-ons like SEO, SEM, design and more! At the two year mark we will refresh your site for FREE!
If you are not happy with the service. We understand. Cancel any time. Your site will remain live through the last pay period then shut off.
We believe in our offering and years of experience so much that we don’t think you will ever want to cancel. As we journey with you through the first few years of your web sites life or rebirth we believe the experience, outcome, and deliverable will be so positive the monthly fee will not only make sense but also turn into a bigger scale project that we can work on together for years to come.
We look forward to working with you. Changing the face of your web presence and telling your story better than ever before. You will have a site that you will be proud of, can make a difference with, and will be Always Fresh for your customers and audience!
