I was quite taken aback by this. I was charging her substantially less than $3000 but I was charging what I thought the work was worth. The client was a small insurance company near our base in Valparaiso and I could not see how anyone could justify charging so much money for something as small as a website for a small business.

Many small business owners are intimidated by the prospect of creating a website and will settle for someone that says that they’ll just take care of it all for them. My advice to small business owners looking for web development is – don’t fall for that.

Think of your website as an extension of your normal marketing efforts. It acts as a way for people to find you. Your website needs to explain who you are, show off your work, where you’re located and how they can get in touch with you. The amount of work involved in creating a website of that size, in my mind, is not worth $3,000.

As a corollary to this topic – don’t also fall for services that promise a cheap website, quickly and set up in a hour. Services from people like Inuit come to mind where they promise ‘to build a website tonight’ for little to no money.

The problem with services like this is that you are getting what you paid for. Your website is being built with a template that is being used by thousands of other websites. Chances are the interface is not as simple to use as it says and you also lose a lot of control of your site. Many of these services are so cumbersome to use that many small business owners build the site and forget about it – leaving it unchanged for years.

To stay competitive on the web in your market – your website needs to be updated often and kept fresh.

That’s why we build websites with Wordpress. Wordpress gives you complete control after we’ve handed the site over to you. Wordpress has a simple interface that allows you to edit and update your site that’s as simple as editing a Word document. Rubber Duck and Company uses a set of premium Wordpress templates that we’ve had to pay for a license to use. The templates work for a variety of applications and what sets us apart from the ‘website tonight’ folks is that we’ll customize the template so it doesn’t look like every other small business website out there.

So, if you’re looking to redevelop your existing website or build it for the first time – it shouldn’t cost you a fortune.

Don’t believe me? Then contact us first.

You need a website because while your operations may not be online, your customers ARE online.

Google has changed the way people search for local business – the yellow pages are an irrelevant door stopper these days. It’s no longer worth it to invest in a yellow pages ad when your customers aren’t looking at it. Your customers are looking online and it’s time you got there.

Now, most business owners are intimidated by the thought of being online. You don’t need to be – running a website has never been easier and more low maintenance. We specialize in developing websites with Wordpress and Drupal – two systems that make running feature rich and impressive websites a breeze.

Think of your website as an online brochure.

It needs to do 4 simple things:

Tell What You Do
Tell Who You Are
Tell Where You Are
Tell How to Contact

Your site can certainly do more than that with a website – but those basic principles are enough for a successful website. Those are the principles we use when we develop our client website – keep things simple and provide the information that consumers are looking for.