Paying Monthly for Your Website

On a recent business trip to California with a client, I encountered a web design company whose business model differs from most. Now, before I go on, let me make it clear that every company is entitled to their own business model. After all - it's a free market. But this article, as with all our articles, comes from a perspective you're familiar with: a small business owner. (Okay, and we're a little biased too.) As a small business owner myself I know that a budget must be carefully watched - perhaps more so than larger companies - even when investing in something as important as marketing. So I was a bit amazed by folks eating up what this company's sales reps (yes, they had sales reps) had to, well, sell. For as low as a few hundred dollars a month (and if you're in this company's niche market) you can get a website online in a matter of days and have the ability to edit your site as you wish. Okay, read that sentence again... go on, I'll wait. That's right - a few hundred dollars a month to have a website that you can edit as you wish. Now, I don't know about you, but if I'm a prospect looking at that I would immediately ask, "If I or someone on my staff is doing all the work to update the site, what am I paying you for?" Their answer might be that you're paying for hosting, or 24/7 customer service, or specific "point and click management" tools, etc., etc. What if you don't need ALL the tools they offer? Or maybe you're computer savvy and 24/7 customer service is overkill. Then what? Perhaps they discount a couple hundred a month so you're left paying around a hundred for hosting each month. A hundred dollars per month for hosting? Unless you're running a VPN or have a dedicated server, that's way too much! Especially if the features included with the hosting plan are limited. But let's say, for example's sake, that Jane Doe goes for it - the whole shabang. Let's say it costs right around $300 per month. That's $3600 per year for a website with limited features (how many pages?) that you're doing all the work for and that you probably don't own (is that stock photography? And whose copyright is it anyway?). Not to mention domain registration every year. Multiply that by 5 years and you've paid $18,000!! Sound extreme? Well that $300 was actually quoted during a sales pitch. But let's try a more "conservative" figure. How about $75/month, including web hosting. In one year that's $900. That's still a lot of money to be paying monthly for a website. Especially when you know that it can be spent elsewhere. Instead of wasting your money on a site that probably won't get you the results you really need (let's not get into coding practices), you could pay less than or the same as their yearly total once for a custom-designed site that comes with a content management system. And you know who can do just that for you? Yep, you guessed it.