The 2.5K "professional" website

One frustration we have in regional Australia is the bargain basement 2.5K website and I'm not sure if it's limited to regional areas but there are a few challenges here that I think freelancers and agencies need to look at more closely when pricing to this level.

Problems with a 2.5K website

1. If you're trying to do the whole project yourself then your trying to do everything good but not great. The term "Jack of all trades, master of none" comes to mind does't it.
2. You should not be trying. to do the work of a specialist yourself - it's not only greedy but it's stupid. Consider:
   1. You get sick and can't build a website, are you not replaceable, what happens to your bills?
   2. How do you keep your skills up across the different areas.
   3. How is your family going? when did you see them last or are you working an 80 hour week?
   4. Your limiting yourself to the amount of projects you can be involved with.
   5. You're doing a disservice to your customer by not providing high qualtiy to all of the elements going into their website.
   6. You're limiting the ability for your customer to scale the project and provide additional opportunities you'll find during a discovery.
3. You're setting a presedent that this is how much a website should cost in regional Australia.
4. If you are paying others for service then your certainly not even breaking even on the project.
5. You're cutting corners such as using a DIY builder and template. This has it's own inherit prolems for you as a business feeding a giant money making machine but even here you won't make a profit unless you're maybe doing websites on the side of your main income and even then what's your weekends worth to you.

Let's break things down a little further because I"m sure many of you still think $2500 is possible, has to be possible when our overseas competitors charge $500 for a website.

Let's break it down at a very low hourly rate of $100 (This is CHEAP)

• Base Fee ($500) pays for licensing setup of infrastrcuture, DNS
• Discovery ($500) should not be free and has to involve keyword and competitor research to be successful
• 5 pages UX ($500) wireframes 100x5
• 5 page UI Concepts ($500)
• Copy ($500)
• 5 page Development ($500)
• Project managment ($200)
• Launch Fee ($300) includes time for setting up Google analytics, 301 redirects, mobile testing, broken links and optimisation.

Total $4000

There are some shortcuts I've taken here such as photography which we always include with our websites as mandatory which would easily take the website to 5k.

So you think your different and you can still do it

Most of you won't include discovery which in itself is a disservice. You don't take your car to a mechanic and say there's something wrong and expect them to spend time for free figuring out what "there's something wrong with my car" actually means. We accept that this is part of the process.

Next time you have a customer ask how much a website is going to cost don't think of it as your pricing a website. Ask them how much they're prepared to "spend" on the process and if they say someone can do it for $2k-2.5k and if you can't persuade them a website at that cost is not going to be of any value then maybe it's a website you shouldn't be doing at all and go work at Woolworths or Coles for more money.

No wonder so many regional marketers are burning out.

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