Forum Moderators: phranque
I have mapped it out and honestly think that it can earn me (the site that is) twice this amount in a 6 month period what do you guys think...
I have not factored in link building and general SEO though I have indicated to the desigtners how important this is.
Your Thoughts..
Jamaican Food
can a website really cost USD$30,000.00 to build
Sure it could. It sounds like you might be having second thoughts... Programmers and developers aren't inexpensive, and since you stated you had a team put together I'd venture a guess that you are building a custom site from the ground up. It's probably money well spent.
At the other end of the spectrum a person could hack together a workable site using 100% free components. A computer, desk and comfortable chair can be had for free on nearly any curbside in Berkeley (or any other college town) right after graduation. There is plenty of free website software available. All one would pay for is hosting... maybe.
The difference between the two sites could be minimal.
Look at it like this. You've just spent 30K on a new car. It might be a great car and last for years, or it could be a lemon. And if it is a lemon, you're stuck with it - the dealer won't take it back and you can't make him.
Indicating it to them doesn't mean it'll be put together search engine friendly from the ground up, or that they even know how. If you're putting out that kind of cash, you'd better get some involvement with SEO going out the gate, before even a line of code is written. Navigation structure is an integral part of optimization, and it's a lot easier to map it out beforehand and build it that way from scratch. There are some sites way more expensive than that, that can be absolute dogs for search engine indexing and have to be torn apart and redone - or cloaked.
Unless it's an enormous, highly complicated site with lots of bells and whistles, that sounds like an awful lot if no SEO is being built in - meaning search engine friendly URLs and navigation structure. Search engine friendly, data-driven "designer quality" sites can be gotten for far less - and not outsourced offshore either. But it depends on the size and architecture of the site.
Sure it's worth it if you'll get a gorgeous site that will convert and bring that kind of ROI - but consider where the traffic will come from and whether you'll be able to get regular search listings or be dependent on PPC. Putting out that amount, in your place I'd pull in an SEO to assess from the start and make sure they know how to do it right.
... but are you sure.
i'd certainly want to lay out all my reqirements very specifically to them in advance.
I suggest that you invest considerably less money in a more straightforward site, and use it to test the water in your chosen market. Find out what $1000 will buy you, for instance. Because a more expensive website does not mean that it is necessarily better for visitors.
With that said, if you're getting a highly complex, feature-rich site custom built, this estimate isn't high at all. My question would be if you really need such an elaborate site right off the bat. You may be able to start with something much more basic, with the idea of upgrading later once you see how things are going.
Not to be a damper on your enthusiasm, but if your projected income is based on "probabilities" with no personal experience, you're probably expecting much more, much faster, than you're likely to actually get.
It depends on the functionality you've asked for.
It's a lot of money, but i wouldn't say US$30K for an entire site was expensive. Depending on the nature of the site ten times as much could easily be considered very cheap.
>> What does it really cost to build a website..?
If you set US$30K as a measure for "expensive" there are sites that you would have to empty the nearest bank in order to get made (figuratively speaking). In my experience, large-ish sites can easily have annual costs 200 times that amount and more. And then, very large sites have very large costs of course. As one example, the BBC has annual expenses for bbc.co.uk of around GB£ 66.7M (US$ 127.6M [finance.yahoo.com] - source: PDF [bbc.co.uk])
That's more than four thousand times your US$30K budget. Then again, there are sites that cost no more than the hours of work you put into them personally.
>> honestly think that it can earn me (the site that is) twice this amount in a 6 month period
That's the important part here - everything else matters close to nothing compared to this. If this is really the case, then i would consider it a bargain, no less :)
And we loose money on the setup, every time.
There are still many man-hours of work on our end to plug everything into our custom back-end, setup the admin area (which is where we really shine), setup the database, servers, etc. Our setup fee is to ensure the client isn't going to back out on us after we've done all this work.
Our sites generate, at a minimum, $1 million in revenue a month and about $200k in profit. These numbers can be 3-6x that, and we take our cut based off how much we do for the client.
Development costs aren't cheap. I love how people drive around in expensive cars, and then use cheap web hosting or cheap computers. If the website provides you the income to drive that expensive car, then you shouldn't go cheap -- if you have gone cheap, imagine how much more you could make if you went with a better developer.
We've got a client now that we told over two years ago to let us start developing multiple sites in their arena. They fought us, because they didn't want to pay the expenses. They now have a competitor that, in just the last two years, has built a business stealing my client's potential customers and they're making millions every year. Had that client listened to us two years ago, they would have spent less money probably -- as it is now, they've laid down a $25k deposit for us to get started and have been made *fully* aware that the costs will be significantly higher -- probably in the $50-100k range. Their answer? "Spend whatever it takes."
You get what you pay for most of the time. If this developer isn't going to do even basic SEO for your site, however, I'd look elsewhere.
S
It might sound repetitive, but content is king. The first site was created with much technology in mind. Lots of custom applications, personalized tools for visitors, etc. In the end, people just go for the content.
We spend $3-5k on writers, photography and mapping rights for each site -- minimum! We've got one with over $30k in photography alone (and they have a full time photographer on site now, and I'm not including those photos in that tally).
I know lots don't believe in the content aspect, but it has been a big winner with us. Approaching authority sites for link-backs is never really an issue because of the quality content we have.
