The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: BoostJunky on June 04, 2020, 08:20:59 AM
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Hey eveyone, we own a small business here that needs a major revamp (complete remodel) in terms of our website.
I have tried to source local companies but the price ranges are all over the map. I also looked on Fivver.com and it seems I can get a pretty competent developer for $1,000 with other price ranges in the $3,000 - $5,000 range from referrals. I will need some SEO and MLS functions as its real estate based. (Unsure if Wix or Squarespace can do this well).
I'm looking for average costs to do this (hosting included) as we are paying far too much monthly to a crappy service that doesn't do much.
Apologies if this is the wrong forum.
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I don't think you have given enough details for anyone to give useful feedback.
Website development is similar to "mode of transportation" - the costs will depend on whether you need a Huffy bicycle from Walmart to go to your grocery store, or an Apollo 13 rocket to go to the moon.
In your situation, I will start from where your current website is going wrong. Is the UI clunky? Are there functionalities that are not working?
In case you don't need complicated stuff, I will probably suggest DIY to start. Places like WIX etc offer a lot of help. Wordpress is more widely used. If you just need a static website that will redirect to your shop/office/cell-phone - then these options with 100% DIY should work perfectly.
SEO is - in my (unpopular) opinion - is overrated. If you need to be high up in search engine - you need to make your website such that people will come to it. Perhaps you can write blogs on the site that becomes very popular? A forum? other great content that people find very useful and get linked often? Without these "valuable" content, I am not sure how much money you can spend over millions of others all over the world in trying to game Google's algorithms. You could buy ad using search keys - but I know I personally avoid any such "ads" from google and focus on sites that make it to the top on their own merit. So I don't know how effective even they are.
If you decide that you *do* need professional help, then you need - at a minimum - to have either several tens of thousands every year in budget for it, or perhaps find a technical dude who will become your business partner and takes equity from you. It's very easy to burn through a *lot* of money engaging tech people, and it is incredibly easy to not get good results out of it. Upwards of 70% of all technical projects are considered "failures" - and these are where the projects had professional staffing for project management etc.
As a small business owner, you can beat these odds of failure on a technical project. But for that you will need to be sufficiently technical so that you can do the PM and QA tasks on the project yourself.
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$1000 won't get you much. Even at $20/hour, that's a little over a week of work.
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$1000 won't get you much. Even at $20/hour, that's a little over a week of work.
I'm a web developer, and I'm confident that a single week of my time would dramatically improve almost any small business website.
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$1000 won't get you much. Even at $20/hour, that's a little over a week of work.
I'm a web developer, and I'm confident that a single week of my time would dramatically improve almost any small business website.
I am sure, but would you take 20usd/hour?
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I do web development work as well. $1k, isn't much for a full site, so I'd be careful there. Also, the $3-$5k quotes seem really high, unless the functionality needed is more advanced then described. In general, I charge $1,500 for a basic, informational site and $2,500 for an e-commerce site. It sounds like the site in question is somewhere in between, so would think that ~$2k is a fair price.
As far as hosting, it depends alot on your needs, but you should be able to get away with paying between $10-30/m (though, I'd go direct and not host through a 3rd party).
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Thanks everyone for the replies, I think I have a target where I should be now.