How much should I spend on a website?

Stop.

Let me ask you a question first: What do your customers need that you can help them with?
And another one: Why do you need a website?
Finally, before we start: When do you need a website?

If you can answer with...

1 - evidence from real customers, in their words,
2 - proof you're sunk without a website, and
3 - confirmation that the lack of a website is a problem for you right now, and there's nothing else that will fix it

...then great - get in touch and I can help you work out roughly what, if anything (there are some fantastic ways to spend £0.00 on building a site), you should be spending. And stop reading, save yourself 5 minutes; you've done all the hard work so you don't need this article.

Not you? Don't worry! Read on...

My guess is that you currently have no website, or you do have one and you want to improve it. It doesn't really matter which of these situations apply to you, the advice here works for both so please read with that in mind (I may flip between each scenario). The best thing you can do when thinking about a website, well actually, anything digital or online at all - app, social media page, online directories etc. - is to take a while to build even just a small digital strategy first. As I mentioned in last week's article, there isn't a template you can download to work out what your digital strategy is - the best strategy for you will be unique to your business. However, I have a trick that anyone involved in setting up or running anything online for their business can use to pretty quickly get a better idea of what they should be thinking about before gauging the costs of websites - and it's very easy to remember. It's the 3 Ws in "www." - you probably type this into your phone or computer most days:

What | Why | When

Don't cheat!

Go back to the top and look at the three questions I asked you at the start. Answer these fully, and you'll have a digital mini-strategy to use that will shape your thinking and help you better define what you're asking for. I suspect you wouldn't walk into an estate agent and ask "how much is a house?". They may be able to give you an average price for the area, but is that of any practical use if you actually need to buy a house? Same with a website, hence why I can't answer the question in the title of this article in a meaningful way.

But if you think through the following three areas carefully, you can quite easily write a mini digital strategy which will give you a much better starting point to use if you genuinely need to work out cost. And you will be able to articulate your needs much better to someone who might be giving you a quote for a website.

What do your customers need that you can help with?
It's really important that you try to push yourself on this one. To use an example from an earlier article, if your business sells power tools, don't just take your customer's first answer that they need your help to sell them a drill. Ask them why they need a drill. In fact keep asking them "why?" until you get to the real reason they came to you - they want to hang a picture on their wall.

Speak to your customers, I mean really speak to them and understand their motivations for coming to you, the situations they are in, what goals they are trying to complete. Take your time and build up the evidence, and then look for patterns and common themes. This will tell you what your customers really need help with and will be the first pillar of your strategy. You may know all this about your customers already, but do you understand how it translates into the digital world? If not, ask them specifically about that.

To give you a real-world example from a project I worked on, I'd been tasked with re-vamping an online tool for my employer so that our customers could see a complete view of the money that they'd spent with us, who in the client's business had been spending it, all cancellations, refunds, historical transactions, the lot. All on a nicely designed easy to use online dashboard. And then we went to visit some of our customers face-to-face and asked them what they needed from us, how they intended to use the information, and why. The pattern that came out indicated a very different need. Shock horror, we weren't the only supplier that they used and so all they wanted was a button to download all raw transaction data so they could cut and paste it into a central spreadsheet where they could combine it with other supplier data for overall reporting. No need for a slick website dashboard, it wasn't what they needed our help with.

Why do you need a website?
Now you're (hopefully) getting onto my wavelength, let's tweak this question a bit. It should really be 'Why do you need to be online?'

You understand the importance of 'going digital' for businesses already or you wouldn't be reading this. But there are plenty of ways to be online without a website. You need to work out why being online will align your business goals with your customers' needs.

Let's say you're a plumber with an emergency out-of-hours service. The answer will likely be "so that someone can get hold of me quickly in an emergency, and I can be paid to fix their problem". Go back to your customer feedback from the first question. Chances are that you need to be online for when people grab their phones in the middle of the night to search for someone to fix a sudden leak, but they'll only care that they can see your phone number, and whether you are open to a call, and of course that your details can actually be viewed properly in a mobile browser. They won't bother clicking onto a website to look at a range of bathrooms you've installed over the years first, they just want to speak to you ASAP. Having up-to-date and accurate contact details with service descriptions visible on directory sites like Yell and Thomson Local, and also registering with Google My Business, may be all you actually need at first. No website needed.

If you sell physical products, could a more effective first step, instead of jumping straight into an e-commerce site, be to set up a Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter profile and link straight to an Amazon or eBay shop?

Look at what your customers need from you, work out the best places to make yourself available to them online in a way that suits them, and start from there. You may well end up with a website, but don't assume it's your starting point. The starting point is to know and understanding where your customers start, and align your business to being visible there first.

When do you need a website?
You're forming a great mini-strategy now! You have a deeper understanding of what your customers need your help with, so you'll know what content and features they'll need to see from you to directly address this, and you also know where they are on the internet. It's now about doing the most effective thing first.

Again, let's re-frame this final question to simply "When?". This is the hardest part. This is prioritisation.

What do you do first? What do you start now, what can wait? You may have worked through this and realised that there is actually a lot you can be doing without building a new website or updating an old one. There isn't a one-size fits all process to answer this; but through the work you've done with the other two questions, it's likely that you'll be well armed to see what will give you the most value with the least effort. That's where to start!

New business or established, it's far more important to check that you know the answers to these questions before asking how much a website costs. If you need assistance working through this, then I can help! I'm currently offering a free one hour consultation where I'll look at your current online presence or new business, and give you a 5-point plan to help you begin building a digital strategy. Do let me know if I can help!