Looking For A Penticton Website Designer?
Having a website to promote your company and your products or services is an excellent idea, but there are some very important things you should know before you hire a designer to build your website.
Websites Are Useless Without Traffic
Having a website is only the beginning of marketing online. Just because you have a site it does not mean that your customers will be able to find you when they search online. If nobody can find your site then you might as well not even have one. A lot of people realize this after it is to late. They have already paid a designer to build their site and then they find out that it is going to cost them even more money to have their site optimized for the internet. After shelling out a thousand dollars or more, finding out you have to spend even more money is the last thing you want to hear.
When searching for products or services online people rarely look past the first page of the search results. To make sure that your site is on the first page you must have a clear idea of your target market, and the keywords they would use to search for a business such as yours. This is something you should do before you even have your site designed so you can optimize your websites content and structure.
With your list of keywords you can then have your site designed in a manner that will get you target traffic from the search engines. These keywords should be included in the code of your website so the search engines know what your site, and each page of your site is about.
Once your site is designed you may still require on going internet marketing to maintain, or improve your search results. It is best to hire a search engine optimization expert to help you with this. You might want to shift some of your offline marketing budget to be used for SEO. Newspapers, Yellowpages, and radio have become less effective in recent years, and the money you are currently spending on these traditional marketing methods would likely give you more bang for your buck if switched over to a SEO budget instead.
How Much Should I Spend On Website Design?
It really depends on what you need, but the average price for a basic custom designed website is $1,000. Any custom features will increase that price.
You may of seen ads on TV where you can get a site for much less. These sites are template based and do poorly in the search results. With a template site your site will never be found by your customers.
You should spend as much as you can afford to have your website designed. Your website will be an asset and once it is built it will give you years of value. If you are on a tight budget, but still want a website that does well in the search engines there is an affordable solution. For $399 you can have a custom website designed that is fully optimized for search.
$399 Website Benefits
Search Results
The $399 sites do excellent in search. With the money you saved you can put it towards SEO, giving you an advantage over your competitors.
Content Management
If you hire a designer to build a site for you chances are it will be a static website. This means the site never changes, or if you need to make a change you have to pay your designer to do it for you. The $399 sites come with a content management system. A CMS allows you to easily update your site whenever you want. This gives you full control. It also allows you to make changes anytime, and add additional content easily. The search engines love it when you add new content so this is a major benefit.
Upgradable
You can add features to your site as needed. For $399 you get a starter site. If down the road you decide you want additional features, like an online store for example, then you can easily add on the desired feature in the form of a plugin. Most of the plugins are free. Some you might have to pay for but the cost is very reasonable. Installing the plugins is very easy to do yourself, but if you would rather have someone do it for you the cost is quite low.
Hosting
You get your first months hosting for free. After that it costs $32 per year.
For more information on hiring a Penticton website designer, or having your current site rate higher in the search engines contact On Fire Marketing.