Neat Redesign

There are literally dozens of small businesses on the Internet, each trying to outcompete the others. But an equally hard component of establishing a solid small business is budget deficiency. How can a small business site owner set up a website for $3000?

Clearly, there are lots of challenges in front of many small business website owners:

• develop a solid business plan
• set up a website
• market the product and the website
• provide excellent customer service
• deliver the product or service

What one can do him- or herself and what is best to invest the budget to get the extra edge?

Of course, many small business owners can develop business plans themselves. Especially, when there are numerous free corresponding resources on the Internet.

Setting up a website is relatively easy for someone, who knows his way around HTML or CSS. One can use a free CMS (WordPress, Zen Cart, etc) to set up an initial website. But will the site have the unique look and feel to match the business? Will it have efficient navigation or page layout?

Some owners may wish to stop on the free choice (not exactly free, they spend their time on it, too), some may want their site designed with the help of professionals. Choices everywhere.

What good it is for a business if noone knows about it? Naturally, some budget is spent on advertising (offline, online, PPC, etc).

Providing excellent customer service is important of course, but it is hard to invest a lot here apart of one’s own efforts and personality.

Product or service delivery is also important. But it is also problematic to invest noticeable budget here, apart from choosing the delivery partner carefully.

So it all comes to establishing or promoting a solid website. But before the site promotion may begin, you’ll need a website. This is what you’ll be living with for the next several years. Now add to the fact that you can do your keyword research and minimal promotion yourself (with some learning, yes..studying opportunities everywhere), we may end up with the choice of seeking a designer to create a site for us. Here is what can be done:

• graphical design
• back-end design (CSS templates)
• dynamic scripting (PHP)
• website content (copywriting)
• SEO: keyword research, on-page optimization, link building
• website marketing: site advertising
• website usability

As a site has to be fast, informational and beautiful, it’d be wise to develop a great design first, then fill it with content.

Here, a small business website owner should rather choose the contractor wisely, as there may a small difference between what you can get for $300 and $3000. A good professional can develop a good looking graphical layout for $700-1500, back-end web development can be done for about $500-700.

If you are pressed for cash, you may want to develop just a graphical layout and a logo (yes, this stuff is considered as different jobs by the designers) with the help of a designer and do the HTML/CSS coding yourself. However, you may want to hire a web developer here as well, depending on how you want to manage your business.

Freelance copywriters can create moderately digestable content for about $30 per page and you’ll need about 15-30 pages at least. That’d be about $1k.

Website usability comes in $300-1500 chunks (for the moderate budget, at least)

If you mix and match properly (choosing best available quality for moderate fees), you may end up with a good website to start on:
- a logo: $300
- a graphical layout (a Photoshop file): $1500
- web development (HTML/CSS coding):$700
- website usability: $800
- some SEO promotion: $500-700
That would amount to $4000 total. Too bad if you don’t have the extra budget. But as the items are listed in the order of importance, you may stop where you want. (SEO and site promotion can be done by yourself, so if you just do your keyword research and writing text stuff yourself.)

So what would you spend or advise someone else to spend the $3000?

P.S. Here is an article on how to choose a web designer.

P.P.S. On a similarly related note, an article from Mike Grehan about considering what to do when on a low budget, and an article from SEOmoz, featuring various low budgets and possible ways of spending them on SEO.

Update: check out an article by Chris Tacy on why $10 000 is the only true price for a website.

Related posts:

• Neat Redesign’s two month’s digest
• What is a liquid (fluid) web site design
• MyNeatSite becomes an official Microsoft Small Business Specialist

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 9:50 am and is filed under Design, Usability, Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.