Your website is an investment, and one of the most visible and critical investments in your marketing strategy. Like most communications tools, how much you invest will certainly impact the results you see from it.
Can you get away with a simple and inexpensive website for $4,000? Certainly, depending on your goals and what you’re hoping to accomplish. However, more often than not, it’s worth the money to invest more. Custom websites can range in costs from $12,000 – $30,000, and in some cases, beyond.
Why? And more importantly, how can you best decide the right budget number for your goals?
When deciding how much to invest in your website, we would encourage you to consider the following:
Site map
A fresh design might look sharp, but your low-end website investment will more than likely keep the actual structure and site map the same. This is a huge missed opportunity.
Assuming you have some sort of Analytics in place on your old site, there is a ton of data available to you that will shed some light on what has and hasn’t worked in the past. What pages have users engaged with the most? What are they searching for but not finding? What paths have they taken through your old site? This is all important data to leverage and inform a more optimized and user-friendly sitemap.
Additionally, the world has changed since your last website design. Some updated keyword research will help to make sure that your site structure is helping to give users what they’re looking for, improving your rankings in search engines.
Interior page design
At the low end of a website investment, your new homepage may be pretty sharp. However, what does the rest of your site look like? More often than not, your interior pages will include a large image at the top (called a hero image) and a bulky block for body text.
This can suffice, depending on your goals.
However, if you are concerned at all with search engine optimization, website engagement, and the ultimate user experience, you’ll want to have all of those interior pages mapped out and leveraged to their fullest extent.
With a more significant investment, you’ll see wireframes and designs for the interior pages as well, leveraging every moment of your audience’s attention to keep them engaged and moving throughout your site.
Content strategy and SEO
Similarly to the first two points, simply repurposing your existing content is one route to go, depending on your resources and goals.
However, a website re-design is the perfect opportunity to freshen up your content to better reflect your brand, appease Google and other search engines, and give users more of what they’re looking for. This in turn will keep users on your site longer, only further improving your search engine performance.
Calls-to-action
You need to show an ROI with your website design. That could mean a number of things for your organization, again depending on your goals.
If an ROI means an increase in sales or leads generated, you’re going to want to leverage every opportunity available to you to engage your website users and encourage them to take an action on your site. A higher-end website is going to encompass a better strategy for user engagement and lead generation.
If you’ve been thinking about a new website, make sure you’re making the most out of your investment. You can connect with Kayden, our Digital Director, to chat further at ka****@*******gn.com.
