26/11/2022
Know Your Design and Programming Budget
If you know how much you’re wanting to spend, don’t be scared to tell a designer when they ask what your budget is. They’re not trying to get the most money out of you as they can, they’re just trying to figure out a plan that will work best within your budget.
For example, if you had R10,000 to spend on a design and wanted something just like Facebook, it probably wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do since there is a mountain of programming that would need to be done. Since the designer knows your budget and has an idea of what you want, they can put together a package that will work for you, but it might not have everything included since you want a clone of Facebook and that would cost much more than R10,000.
They can, however, put together a design and get some custom scripting done for you that would get you on your way to having a unique social network, which would get you on your way to having a finished product down the road.
We regularly ask people what their budgets are because we, just like the example above, are trying to figure out exactly how we can get as much done for you within your budget so you’re as happy as possible.
Some Extras That You Might Need
We all want a website designed for a reasonable price, and that’s exactly what we do! But there are some additional add-ons that you might want to think about before you spend all your money on the design.
If your budget for everything is R3,000 and you spend all of that on your design, you will be upset when you can’t get the hosting you want or the fact you can’t spend any money on marketing to bring in traffic and sales.
This is why we always let people know about the additional charges, that are usually required if you want to start running a website. These extras are:
1. Domains and Hosting
Every single website out there runs on a domain, which means you’ll need one as well. You can purchase these through big domain registrars and most of the time you can purchase them when you set up a hosting plan for your website. You’ll need to pay to renew your domain name each year and your hosting can be paid every month or on an annual basis, that’s up to you.
If you don’t know how to do any of this, that’s not a problem at all since we can walk you through the entire process.
2. Online Marketing
Most new website owners think “If you build a website, the traffic will come” and that’s far from the truth. In order to get plenty of traffic to your website, you will need a proper marketing campaign up and running for at least a few months before you start to see a positive ROI.
There is a small chance that you could be profitable relatively quickly, but I wouldn’t expect it since it tends to be competitive when you’re a new website fighting your experienced and older competitors in order to obtain clients.
Online marketing comes in many forms, such as:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
SMM (Social Media Marketing/Management)
PPC Management (Pay Per Click Marketing/Management)
Each has it’s own strengths and takes a long time to learn, so we highly recommend working with a credible SEO company if you want to start doing any sort of online marketing.
3. Website Content
If you’re writing up all your own content, and even your own blog posts, this isn’t going to cut into your overall budget at all.
But, if you’re not the best writer and you need someone to write up your home/index, sales pages, product pages, blog posts, etc. it would be an additional charge because this takes a bit of time and effort in order to be done right.
If you want images within the content, they will likely have to be purchased from a stock image company in order to prevent a lawsuit from unlawfully using images you found online.
4. Website Maintenance
Not every website will need us to go in and maintain it since a lot of clients don’t update much after they go live. Adding blog posts is easy to do and can be done by yourself, or you can hire us to do it if you really want.
We charge a very low rate of R250 p/hour for website design and content updates, and we’ll always give you a quote before the updates are made so that you know exactly how much it will cost.
