One easy test to see if the website development company you are hiring is a professional

Would you believe there is one easy test to tell if a website development company you are working with is a professional or not?  And it takes just a couple minutes of your time.  I'm assuming if you're reading this that you might be shopping for a website developer - someone to take your site to the next level.  I'm also assuming you want to hire someone professional - someone who has your company's best interests at heart and wants to create for you the very best website to accomplish your goals.

A website development company should be all about YOU - the customer.  Not about them, or their aggrandizement - and thus we come to the one thing you can easily check about a website development company to determine if they are the kind of company you want to work with:

Do they insist on, or automatically, put their own link on your website?

You've probably seen it before.  Embedded somewhere at the bottom of someone's site in tiny print "Website designed by XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", with a link back to the website company.  I guarantee you that a website development or design company that insists on their own branding on a site that they developed for YOU for YOUR branding does not have your best interests at heart.  They are thinking of themselves - not you - when they add that tagline.  They should be confident enough in the results of their development effort that they KNOW you will talk about your positive experience with them and tell others.  They should be confident enough in their own website, and marketing efforts that they don't have to resort to virally spreading their reputation by embedding it in their customer's sites - frequently without their permission or knowledge.

The only exception I can think of to this rule would be if the website development company is specifically offering a trade, which frequently happens on not-for-profit sites.  We will do a development effort for you at a significant discount, if we can advertise our effort on the site.  But other than that - there is really no good reason to have someone else's name and branding on your site.

So go look at your own site - does it have your web developer's link on it?  Might be time to shop for a new developer.  Looking for a developer? Check other sites they've done and/or do a google search for their site name - if other companies have their signature at the bottom, move on.  Look more until you find a company confident enough to develop sites without putting their own stamp on them.

What does a Best of the Web website cost?

The Rochester Business Journal holds a Best of the Web competition each year.  OS-Cubed is proud to have developed sites that have qualified in the past as a finalist - though this year none of our clients submitted an entry.  The RBJ's competition looks at websites in a variety of categories including Not for Profit cultural, Not for profit human services, Banking and Finance, Education, Business and professional services, Government and Community, Health care, Legal Services, Manufacturing, Real Estate, Retail and Tourism.  In short, a vast cross section of the web services industry.

One of the more interesting questions they ask (and not everyone answers this) is the cost to build the site and the annual cost to maintain it.  Note that the interpretation of these amounts is left up to the submitter of the site and (for instance) may not include internal development costs, volunteer costs (on the part of Not for Profit companies) and other non-accounted for expenses.  Nonetheless, the study offers a nice cross section of the community and what it costs to build and maintain an award winning quality website.

If we look at the data gathered from the information provided, the initial cost of development of an award winning site is roughly $40,000 on average with a range of $325,000 to $2500.  The cost of yearly improvements, upkeep and maintenance arrives at around $6700/year or around 17% of the total cost of the initial site and varies between a few hundred and tens of thousands. 

Award winning sites are typically redesigned every 3 years or so, the cost of which isn't surveyed, but we can expect the cost to be somewhere around 1/4 to 1/2 the initial design cost for a content managed site, and as much as the total design cost for a "built from scratch" site.

So what does this mean for the average company looking to build a site?  Budgets in the over $10,000 range should not be surprising to you.  Depending on features and functions (retail, real estate and banking sites probably cost much more than not for profit or information only sites) you could be anywhere along a continuum of a few thousand dollars all the way to hundreds of thousands.  You also should be expecting to expend somewhere in the 15-20% range to maintain, update and improve your site each year.  As new browsers come out (is your site compatible with IE10 for instance?) sites may well need tweaks and updates to function properly.  Security updates need to be applied, and content needs to be changed and updated frequently.

None of these budgets included demand generation activities including SEO, direct marketing, social media, pay for click or other marketing costs.

Of course you could also opt to build a site for much less than that and not go for a "best of the web" site.  Why you would want to do that when there are competing sites that are better than yours is an exercise I'll leave up to your Marketing manager.  Good luck with that discussion :)

With budgets in that range though, you will want to carefully pick a developer and designer for the long haul - one that has your best interests at heart, and will help save you from costly mistakes - as well as recognize when an investment is worth it.

There's a reason most of our new projects are in social media

There's a reason why most of our newest projects are in the area of social media, for instance the online collaborative education tool Kajour by Knowledge Athletes. The reason is that social media is becoming one of the main new tools in everyone's networking and branding architecture. If it's not one of your main new tools you might want to check out a video from the author of Socialnomics, Eric Qualman.








So my question for you as an entrepreneur is - if you're not creating a product that is social media oriented - what are you doing to include a social media interface or connection to your product and brand? What active role are you taking to ensure that once your new product or service comes out it is relevant?