How Much Does A Professional Business Website Cost?

A professional, lead-generating business website is your number one marketing tool.

To succeed as a business online, a virtual shop front that merely describes your company will no longer cut it; your business website should be constantly working to attract customers and generate revenue.

A professionally designed small business website in Australia, depending on size and complexity, can range anywhere from $5,000- $20,000.

Yes, there are cheaper website options out there, however: end of the day, as the good old saying goes “you get what you pay for”. Cheap web design can say more about your business as a first impression that you’re willing to admit. Sure, the website may function and list your services, but with no marketing, lead generation, email nurturing or conversion strategies in place – you simply have wasted money on an ‘online brochure’ and left crossing your fingers, hoping someone will call you, or fill out an online enquiry.

So what does a professional, lead-generating website look like:

Understanding Your Target Audience

I’ve put this point first purely because of how important this is.

Believe it or not – your website shouldn’t be about you. Your website should be about how you can provide a solution to your target audiences problem.

Your website should have a strong understanding of who you are communicating too. Now I’m not talking about the generic information ie. ‘Women aged between 25-35 living in Perth’ – we need to get down the nitty-gritty information of who they actually are, why do they need your product, what are their current struggles, how can your business provide a solution to their problem.

Once you have identified the persona of your ideal client, the website copy itself should be written directly to that person – as if you’re having a one-on-one conversation with them, so when they’re reading your website’s copy, they instantly have a strong connection with your business, because they feel that you understand their needs.

We actually have a free download about identifying your target audience on our giveaways page – click here to check it out.

First Impressions Are Everything!

A well-designed website does more than promote your services at a high level, it instantly promotes quality and professionalism to the user. The last thing you want creeping into the mind of a potential client is ‘doubt’. It only takes 2-3 seconds for the user to decide how much further they’ll continue on your website, so if your site is well presented and professionally designed, you have a higher chance of the website user staying that little bit longer to know more about your services.

Lead Generation

Not everyone that visits your website will enquire the first time. We’ve been building websites for over 10 years and research shows us that it can take up to 7-10 visits to a website before the user will enter their details into a ‘get a quote’ form.

This is because people are doing their own research, they’re also shopping around and will keep coming back to your website to read more about the services to make sure you’re the right company for them.

Knowing that a potential customer may not enquire straight away, it’s always good to promote various lead generation strategies on your website so you’re being pro-active in obtaining their name and email address.

Email Nurturing

So now you have a bunch of subscribers from a free lead magnet you’ve been promoting – Great, but the last thing you want to be doing is spamming a potential client’s inbox with a ‘sales’ approach within your email marketing campaign – let’s face it, who wants to be ‘sold too’ – not me!

Your lead generation strategy should be solely based around providing value and educating your target audience about your unique key difference, rather than a ‘sales’ approach. If your audience can see the continuous value they’re receiving from your email marketing, without the ‘hard-sell’ approach – when it comes time for the potential customer to make a decision on a product or service your business provides, you now have a much higher chance of converting that lead into a customer because they now see your business is based around value and someone they can trust.

Conversion Strategy

If your business website has gone to all the trouble online to acquire a lead, only to fall short and not convert them into a customer, a conversion strategy is a must.

Whether it’s an email nurturing strategy, messenger marketing or an abandoned cart strategy, they all go hand-in-hand with setting up a successful conversion strategy.

It’s All About The User Experience

A professional business web design really needs to have the end-user in mind from the initial design stage. When working with a local web design Perth company (like Lethal, hint hint) your web designer needs to have a strong understanding of what is the desired outcome of each page. Where do you want the users to go, what do you want them to do on each page?

If you just want the user to browse your website at their own pace and hope they find what they’re looking for – you’ve already lost them. You want to create an experience online that leads the user to the desired outcome.

There are so many other factors apart from a design that contributes to positive user experience, for example, website speed, functionality, content, development, the list goes on.

Mobile Responsiveness

Having a responsive website that is compatible across mobiles, tablets and desktop devices is essential in today’s digital age. This also enhances the overall user experience when promoting your business services to potential customers. The last thing you want to do is cause friction online when someone is viewing your website on a mobile and they have to keep zooming in to read the text, it’s not the best start to a first impression.

Search Engine Friendly

While every business owner would love to be listed on the first page of Google, it’s also a fine line for creating content on your website for search engines to help with rankings, rather than creating content that your target audience would actually want to read.

When it comes to making sure your professional business website has everything set up correctly for search engines to start crawling the content of your website, it’s extremely important to have all keywords or search phrases assigned to each page, page descriptions, title tags and even image descriptions ready to go.

Search Engine Optimisation is a huge topic and something that needs to be done correctly for maximum exposure within search engines. There is obviously a lot more involved in making sure your website is search engine friendly, but the basics are mentioned above.

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When compared to a cheap website quote, you’ll find that the majority of the information listed above isn’t even covered.

You see, cheap web design is all about putting something online as quick as possible, without any real thought or direction on what the site is meant to achieve online.

End of the day, you have to ask yourself, does a cheap web design company really have my businesses best interest at heart – or does it just benefit them with a quick ‘churn and burn’ design service?

What about DIY Website Builders?

DIY platforms such as Squarespace, Wix or Weebly have exploded over the past few years. These options are great for small, one-person businesses as you can easily make your own website for as little as $10-$30 a month.

The catch? Your DIY website will have a generic design, poor user experience and is not Google friendly. From the first click, you are losing customers and potentially thousands of dollars of lost revenue all caused by a cheap website.

Why We Recommend WordPress

Powering 34% of the web, WordPress is currently the most popular website builder and with the requisite coding and design skills, website possibilities are endless.

As a professional web design Perth based company, we prefer to custom design and develop all our business websites using the WordPress platform. There are thousands for templates to purchase for WordPress – but when choosing a template, what you see is what you get. That’s why we prefer to custom build all our websites, that way we have full control over everything for our clients.

Domain Name, Hosting & SSL

Your domain name is your websites address on the web. Some examples include:
Lethal.com.au, Google.com, Apple.com, Wikipedia.org, Facebook.com.

All websites have an IP address, essentially a sequence of numbers (ie: 12.345.678.90).

Given it is practically impossible to remember all numbers making up an IP address, we instead tie these numbers to domain names, so all we need to remember is the name of the website.

The domain name is then linked to the IP address which then points to the server hosting the desired website.

A domain name can cost anywhere from $10- $100 a year while hosting can be as little as $3.95/month. GoDaddy is officially recommended by WordPress. It’s also important to note that not every hosting plan out there is the same. Like anything, you get what you pay for – if you want cheap hosting, where your website is hosted on the same server as tens of thousands of other sites, then expect to pay $3.95 a month. But if you want your own dedicated server for extreme speeds, the costs increase greatly.

If you have an eCommerce site, you will need to ensure your customers’ data is protected. An SSL certificate can cost around $130 per year and will mean passwords and credit card information are secure.

Design

All Lethal websites are completely custom-designed- no templates!

As each project is built and tailored specifically for that client, prices can vary. High quality work takes more time and money but is an investment in the success of your business.

According to WP Beginner a typical custom WordPress theme for business or personal website could cost between $1,500 – $5,000. A custom WordPress theme with additional built-in features or companion plugins can cost anywhere between $6,000 – $10,000. If you have a complex enterprise-level project, then is not uncommon for the prices to go above $30,000.

It is our job to determine which category your business falls and based on your budget, we will walk you through all the options available, with no-BS, honest advice.

Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is very similar to servicing your car. If you don’t pay any attention to system updates and plugin updates – eventually your site will break down.

Yearly website maintenance from Lethal will cost $1,200.00.

In Summary

Understanding the work involved, as well as the benefit of having a well-built, enticing and engaging website that suits your brand message, you can see why it is so important that you initially spend the extra cost. Don’t waste your time and money on a sinking ship; do it right the first time and you’ll be thankful later.

If you are interested in getting a well-designed, lead-generating website up and running, contact the team at Lethal for more info!