$3500 for new website, too high?

M

mbs431

New member
Hey guys. A customer of mine designs websites. My website needs a serious facelift. Basically, I want to start from scratch. My customer offers just that. He will design the entire website himself allowing many features: adding pictures with a click of a mouse, integrating twitter, blogs, and facebook right on the page, high quality videos, etc. He said it would than be another $1000 for optimization on google, bing, etc. Just curious, do you think this price is too high or fair? I'm new at this so I have no idea.
 
I paid around $1,000 for mine. It is search engine optimized for 2 different terms. Take a look at it, decide if your customer could do better ($2,000 better).



Maybe he can, maybe he can't, I don't claim to have the greatest website in the world, but it seems like $3,000 is a BIG ticket price.



Also, included in that price is a year of support. All I have to do is send an e-mail with pics/changes and it gets done within the day. This is a professional company as well.



Hopefully that kind of gives you something to think about. Maybe some other guys with custom websites can chime in.
 
I occasionally design sites for people. $3500 can be a rip off or a bargain depending on the designer and what they are doing. Unless you are dealing with lots of customization,,lots of seo, or a shopping cart with lots of items, $3500 is probably way to high.



The best value is going to come from the designer starting with a template you kind of like and modify it for your needs. Looking at Mark's site. It looks like a basic template with light customization. I can see it does have some basic seo optimization. With the year of updates, the $1000 is a good value



$3500 plus $1000 for SEO seems really excessive. Would have to know the finer details of what they are offering to know for sure.



If you are just starting out in the biz, dont want to spend a lot, and want to be able to modify stuff yourself, I would recommend going with a word press website. Find a template you like and find some one who can set it up, optimize it, and modify the skin for you. There are also lots of free wordpress plug ins for facebook, twitter, etc, or can be coded in for not too much.



Doing this, you can probably have what you want including seo for the $1000-$2000 range.
 
mbs431 said:
Hey guys. A customer of mine designs websites. My website needs a serious facelift.
Click to expand...



the guy who did mine can do one with in 500-1000 range with easy.

3k is toooo much
 
I suggest going with a lower cost site. Unless if you or someone else is going to constantly update the site, ad blog entries etc. it is a ton of work to maintain a site, we actually have someone on full time to manage our site, social media etc. so unless if you want to jump in feet first and do it all, just keep it simple.





John
 
My website was done with a static front landing page, and the rest is a custom WordPress theme so that I can easily update and add content; I bartered with the web developer and did roughly $1500 in retail work in exchange for the site. We didn't do a lot with SEO on it (yet, anyway) but all the bones are there and it will be fairly easy to address in the future.
 
What size city are you in and what is the competition? This may drive the SEO. I paid about $400 for my site and add to it over the year with updated information. My site ranks very high with local searches.
 
Ben hit an important point, SEO is getting more and more complicated. In a highly competitive area you almost have to have either extensive SEO knowledge, or a SEO person, company, or web designer optimizing you. Remember SEO needs change, so just because you are optimized when your site is first created, does not mean down the road you won't need further optimization.
 
Thanks for the input guys. I figured that was a bit steep. I do live in a slightly competitive area. I am organically #1 on google in my city, but I'm not concerned with my city. The money is in surrounding cities and when searching on google, I show up on maybe page 2-4, if at all.
 
elance.com



or [email protected] (he did a few of my sites in the past and will be redoing my current one soon after I had someone else do it back in july last year). Email for a quote, tell him Eric with envious detailing sent you and he will take care of you
 
Think I paid $575 for mine. No SEO and he just did what he could with what I gave him, which wasn't much. I'm just part time though and the only reason I wanted the site was so I didn't have to keep emailing people my price list. :D
 
I don't have the best site but for a free do it yourself job I made out pretty good. I was thinking of paying someone but My site manages to keep my book full. It seems like 3-4 thousand dollars is a lot.
 
It's going to depend on what features you're after. For the typical detailing site, I'd say that's a bit steep. I did what Charlie did and bartered services to have mine redone, and I couldn't be happier.
 
JohnKleven said:
I suggest going with a lower cost site. Unless if you or someone else is going to constantly update the site, ad blog entries etc. it is a ton of work to maintain a site, we actually have someone on full time to manage our site, social media etc. so unless if you want to jump in feet first and do it all, just keep it simple.





John
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I agree with John. Keep it simple- unless you plan to update constantly you'll easily overpay at this cost. Check out, Detailing Templates and email Rob and let him know that John from Reflections Auto Detailing Salon sent you over. His templates typically range less than $500 and he has great portfolio features (including video) with nice easy upload. Check out my site in my signature.



A lot of the money in pages comes from SEO and Social Media updates and you also have to consider how many pages are being built as well. Seems high but can ad up pretty quickly.
 
$3500???? That is a rip off. I had mine done for $400 and I think it is one of the best in my market. I know another person who does them out of FL and she is really good with HTML5 responsive sites and only charges $50 per page done with SEO. She works with the IDA as well as detailers around the world. She runs a few Facebook detailing groups as well.
 
SoCal Mobile said:
$3500???? That is a rip off. I had mine done for $400 and I think it is one of the best in my market. I know another person who does them out of FL and she is really good with HTML5 responsive sites and only charges $50 per page done with SEO. She works with the IDA as well as detailers around the world. She runs a few Facebook detailing groups as well.
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Maybe just a coincidence, but your site has really slow loading times. If thats the norm, your site could use with a different hosting.

Also, some of the text is white with a light grey background. Making it hard to see. Not sure if that is how you intended it to be or just not loading properly. Google can lower your ranking by having text a similar color as background.



Ben
 
Maybe it is your connection.



Ben@Autopia said:
Maybe just a coincidence, but your site has really slow loading times. If thats the norm, your site could use with a different hosting.

Also, some of the text is white with a light grey background. Making it hard to see. Not sure if that is how you intended it to be or just not loading properly. Google can lower your ranking by having text a similar color as background.



Ben
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Thomas Dekany said:
Maybe it is your connection.
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That is possible. We do have a 20mb ul / 20mb dl fiber, but it is Time Warner. So it is fast when it wants to work. :tongue:



Tried the site again and it is loading fast. The white text on grey background is still there though.
 
I clicked on his link and was very fast. Must be comcast



Ben@Autopia said:
That is possible. We do have a 20mb ul / 20mb dl fiber, but it is Time Warner. So it is fast when it wants to work. :tongue:



Tried the site again and it is loading fast. The white text on grey background is still there though.
Click to expand...
 
My formal education is in graphic and web design. I worked as a professional designer for 7 years before becoming a full time detailer. $3500-$4500 is the going rate for what a design firm would charge for a small site like you want. Think of the detailing industry, don't we always rant about hacks making money by under-bidding professionals? As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Does that mean you invest $4k in your first site? I would say hell no. Find a person on guru.com or a college graduate and pay 1/4 of that. Doesn't mean the site will be the best but it will probably look/function better than your current one. I would then suggest dumping any left over funds into SEO/adwords/FB ads etc.
 
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