Why Does Everyone Want A $500 Website?

Working at an agency I come across this scenario day in and day out. There is nothing that irritates me more than to see someone put thousands into marketing and then want a website on the cheap! I am not sure how this whole, "I can get a website for less than a $1000" thing all started but it is ridiculous. Having worked with various developers and designers before I know for a fact that maintaining a profitable web development company is VERY difficult to do. In part because of all these cheap, template, web design companies out there.

The Reality

Well I have news for everyone, you get what you pay for. And if you are serious about your online business then you will be wise to invest in a great website. Most "good" design/development firms will start at about $10k and go up into the hundreds of thousands depending on what you want. You especially need to have a great site design if you intend on doing search engine optimization. Having clean code, good CSS, an organized file structure, and the proper hosting among other things, will really help the search engine spiders index your site well.

Now if you are not too concerned with having your site rank and are simply looking for an online business card then going with a nice, simple, templated website or CMS is probably a good idea. But if you are going to start an e-commerce store or represent your company and gather leads then you will want to make sure that you set aside a good sized budget to get that done. Trust me, do it right the first time.