Let's try to answer the question with another question - How much does a house cost? Like so many other things in life, it all depends on your situation. Do you want to build a new home, or buy an existing one? How many bedrooms and bathrooms do you need? What square footage do you need? What city are you considering? Which neighborhood? What style of home? What is the most you can spend? The list goes on.
Similarly personalized questions are raised when you need a website. What is the primary purpose of the website? Do you have an existing website that needs a fresh look? Or do you wish to build a brand spankin' new one? What style and branding does your website need? Where do you wish to set up your web presence (a.k.a. your domain name)? Do you want the ability to perform content updates yourself? Do you want to sell goods or services on your website? Do you want to target users on mobile devices? And perhaps the most important question: what is your budget? Ultimately, your budget determines what you can afford to buy.
You get what you pay for, after all. Not too long ago, the South African province of the Free State came under fire for spending a reported R140 million (about $15.5 million) on its provincial website's redesign (it was later reported to have actually cost R40 million, or about $4.5 million). The main source of the uproar? The website was built on a free blogging platform, with a theme that cost a staggering... $40. So, the government should have been sent a bill for $40, right?
While $4.5 million is a lot to spend on any website, we don't know what else was included in this price. The thousands of man-hours of planning, meetings, documentation, testing, and training were surely a factor. Perhaps there is an entire custom-built publishing system running behind the scenes that took two years to build and test. Perhaps the website ties into eight disparate data sources, each with its own set of peculiarities, protocols, and access methods. Perhaps there were hundreds of employees that needed to be trained on the new software, and this training was part of the cost.
A website is similar to an iceberg: the visible parts are but a fraction of the whole. There is so much more that happens beneath the surface that we don't see. While you don't need to spend $4.5 million on a new site, the cost of a decent website is rarely just the sum of its components.
Can CC Communications help you design the website that your business deserves? Contact us at Marketing@CCCom.com or call 704.761.4676.
