Damien King
Founder of BreezeBlue
Doing a quick Google search for “website design” or anything related will quickly pull up dozens of AdWords by web design firms, offering fabulous sounding package deals for bargain prices.
Sounds good, right?
Sadly, if you or your business actually intends to be successful online — whether its with building brand awareness, finding new clients or making sales — these packages are going to negatively impact you.
In fact, you’d be better off having no website at all rather than going with a package deal.
Why? Lets find out.
The package deals offered by firms are pretty much set in stone before you’ve even gotten in touch with the company or designer. You’ll get a set number of pages (often something as painfully low as 3-5) for a set price, and thats that.
Want more? Sure, but it’ll cost ya. Quite a bit, actually — “complicated” changes such as building more pages are often charged at $50+ per hour, even though in real terms, for them building new pages (based on templates) takes them about… eight seconds.
A professional designer will be happy to make changes, and honest about their timeframes — anything you want changed about a website can be done.
For these companies, creating websites is no different than basic data entry. You pick one of their preset choices of layout, give them the information about you or your company, and they enter it. These firms focus on low quality, fast turnaround for profit: they’re the McDonalds® of the web design world.
They couldn’t care less about what industry you’re in, how your brand is perceived by the public, or how you’re trying to market yourself. Would you like fries e-commerce with that?
As far as they’re concerned, they take your money, enter your data, and then… NEXT!
With a professional designer, your brand will be looked at, discussed, compared with market competitors, and an accurate, interesting and attractive website is built from the ground up that reflects your business exactly how it should.
I know — this doesn’t sound right. The prices listed are bargains, right?
Well, not exactly. For a preset price of say, £250 or $499, you’ll get perhaps five pages worth of design. Considering the designs are all pulled from templates, and entering your data can take as little as half an hour, you’re effectively paying them $100+ per page, or up to $200+ an hour.
That doesn’t sound too hot.
If you plan on selling products or services through your website, package deal firms will typically say that an “e-commerce addon” or “e-commerce package” comes as an extra, usually between the $1000-3000 mark.
A simple brochure website selling one or two homemade products suddenly starts costing $3,500 — and thats before any “website hosting” or “maintenance” fees.
If you approach a professional designer, that same site would likely be less than a third of that price.
The nature of webdesign packages is that you choose from a range of designs, called templates, how you want your website to look like. Did you have a classy, stylish clean white and soft gold look in mind? Well, unless they happen to have a preset template like that, you’re out of luck.
With a package deal, all control over your brand is taken away from you; you’re left browsing their selection of templates, hoping one of them isn’t too gaudy or dated.
When working with a professional designer, they’ll consult with you about your business — what you want to achieve from the site, how you want to be portrayed online, and so forth.
The internet has developed a lot since it’s early commercial beginnings in the mid-1990s. Websites are cleaner, more attractive, and more user friendly. People expect more from websites.
Sadly, website packages tend to stick with design templates that looked dated five years ago, let alone today!
Having a generic website will immediately turn off visitors. It doesn’t matter if you have the hottest new commodity to offer or your services are second to none: if the first impression a visitor to your site gets is a big, garish wall of blandness, they’ll close the site faster than you can scream “Wait, free offers!”.
To sum up: packaged web deals can be very damaging for your business. Be sure to select a professional designer or firm who can work with you, designing and developing a website that suits your needs and boosting your image. If you’d like to get in touch with me as your designer, I’d love to hear from you to see whether we’d be ideal for working together: just get in touch!