Quote: (10-18-2014 09:41 PM)monster Wrote:
Use wordpress. Unless you ARE ready to pay big bucks (like 5k+) you're never going to get the site looking how you want it. You can learn wordpress really well in about 30-40 hours. There are lots of plugins that make things easy. You could use woocommerce for your shopping cart.
Instead of templates use Visual Composer with a really really basic theme to design your own site from the ground up
I made the mistake of paying a web design firm - actually the best in my town - $3000 for a website and they build some shitty looking wordpress site that I spent 50 hours myself making look professional. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most web design firms & I like that now I know how to do it so I can create any site on my own relatively easily without paying some chumps in the future.
Youtube is your friend for learning WP, Visual Composer and all the other additional plugins.
$3,000 is absolutely nothing for a website. I'm a web designer at a marketing agency. We don't even touch anything under $5000 as we'd lose our ass on it. And even then, the only reason it's profitable is because these are ongoing SEO and marketing clients who continue to pay monthly for ongoing marketing services and the web design is essentially the gateway. People who go acting like they are getting ripped off for paying $3000 for a site have no idea what goes into hiring a professional and the process behind it. Sure anyone can slap together a wordpress site in a day that looks like shit, but do you know to do keyword research for your area on google analytics and write SEO content that's going to drive traffic? Do you know how to decrease bounce rates? Do you know how to properly use H1, H2, H3 tags so that they boost your search engine ranking, do you know how make a website responsive for every screen dimension size possible from 30 inch monitors to 3" phones and still look consistent? Do you know to serve different images to different devices to slash loading times? Do you have all the equipment to test your site on to make sure it's rendering right across Mac, Windows, Android and IOS and in all versions of browsers on those platforms? We use wordpress frameworks too, and most of them are full of bugs, even the popular ones that we have to do custom coding to workaround things to accommodate someone's design. My point is, there's a lot of work and testing that goes into making a quality product. And if someone gets a well designed, bug-free, SEO-ready site for $3000, they got a damn good deal. Just because you CAN put a site together yourself doesn't mean you know what you're doing. I can buy a book and learn how to redo my bathroom, but that doesn't mean it's something I'm going to enjoy doing or even be good at. It would probably be a pain in the ass if that's not my background. I think the same is true for web design.
Another reason to just hire someone is that they are going to do it better and more efficiently than you can. If you run a business, that 40 hours you spent learning wordpress was an opportunity cost. If it took you two weeks to learn, that's two weeks you could've been out making sales and marketing your product. Even one new client might've earned you more money than whatever you saved by going the cheap route on wordpress. Plus consider the fact that a website might be good for 3 years before being redesigned. That $3000 is an upfront cost, but amortized over three years that only amounts $83/month. If done right, that website will have brought you far in excess of $83 a month of business. So the $3000 is really chump change.
Quote:Quote:
One guy quoted me 20k, got a quote from a marketing web design company out in california at $3900.
Prices can be all over the place. Just like hiring a lawyer. Some are going to be cheap ambulance chasers, some are high powered attorneys who only serve fortune 500 companies and you could never afford. There's no way to even gauge what a fair price for a website is. It's like asking what's the fair price to hire a lawyer, or what's a fair price to pay for a car. It depends on that company's reputation, what kind of clients they have and exactly what they do.
A site like Wix may be fine for bubba's chicken wing shack or some no-name band that needs to slap together a site, but no serious business would even think of using a drag and drop template to create a site. You don't even own the site. You couldn't take your files and move them to a different server because it's built on their proprietary software, so if you stop paying your bills or they can't charge your credit card, your site disappears.
Edit--
Case in point, someone I've worked with in the past emailed me because his client says they no longer show up on the first page on google searches. They had their website redesigned. The new designer clearly had no knowledge of how to maintain their SEO and carry it over to the new build. When the new site launched, they lose all that and their page ranking tanked. That's the kind of stuff that happens when you hire a $500 designer in India. That $2,000 he saved as an upfront cost might have cost him who knows how many clients because they fell off the search rankings. He probably LOST money by going to the cheaper guy. That's the kind of big picture shit people need to think about. A website is an investment more than it is a cost, because if done right, it should be making you money while you sleep. Money far in excess of what you paid for it.