Areoff recently provide a quote to an IFA for redesigning their website.
After studying our quotation to provide website redesign, usability, SEO as well as an option for putting a CMS for editing pages and publishing new content, they commented that our costs were ‘considerably divergent’ from a quotation they received from a leading telecommunications company.
Their alternative quote was 50% cheaper than ours.
However, when I studied their quotation which our prospective client was kind enough to share with us I immediately noticed that there was also a considerable divergence in the website design service being offered. These were the main features of their quotation:
- We will create a maximum of 6 pages including a contact form.
- We offer a choice of colour schemes, and 6 different site and navigation layouts.
- We offer the option of one Image Rotator, scrolling up to 5 images.
- You may supply up to 2 images per page in your page content.
- The contact form will collect name, e-mail address and a message from anyone wishing to contact you.
This suggest that they would receive a very rigidly structured template based website instead of the bespoke build Areoff provides to all it’s clients. And what happens if you want more than 6 pages in your website, which is more than conceivable, if not immediately, then maybe in a few months.
Their quotation also made absolutely no reference to SEO friendly features like the inclusion of proper and complete meta-data, header tags, DIV/XHTML page structure and semantic URL’s amongst other things that Areoff always provide as part of a website design service - our believe is that a website should be search engine ‘ready’ from day-one.
Lastly, the telecommunication provider’s proposal made no mention of a CMS which is crucial if a client wants to be able to edit existing wording and add new content to their website. The benefit of a CMS such as the packages Areoff offers is that it goes a long way towards future-proofing a website since it enables the client to add on a whole host of additional features as they need them like blog posts/news, calendars, additional forms, galleries, polls. And a CMS allows you to have as many pages as you like for no extra charge, which has to be a better deal than the ‘pay-as-you-add-pages’ approach that was proposed to our client in the alternative quote.
So our message to all IFA’s looking to have a new website designed or an existing one redesigned: look at the value that is being provided to you by a design/development company rather than just the bottom line cost. More often than not the cheaper of the two proposals can end up working out more expensive - less visibility on search engines due to a poor build, fewer conversions from your website due to poor usability and inferior levels of interaction with visitors, and the ongoing hidden costs of adding and amending content on your website.