Why building an online business is so expensive?
Expensive it’s just a perspective. What you might want to ask is: “Why are others so cheap?” or “What type of value do you provide with your services?”.
Why do other programmers have cheaper services compared to yours?
What you did not know about “others,” which are eighter a “company” or a “freelancer,” is that most will provide indeed, a cheap “website”.
So let’s say they ask for 200-600$ to build you a website.
How the process works
You will be asked a few baseline questions to establish your needs, prefeered design choices and color palete of choice.
After this, you will get a few templates to choose from, with the design that you like, even a close color palete. You will be asked to provide photos, graphics and content for each page, phone numbers, emails and so on.
Everything is great until now, you are happy that everything works as expected, they seem organised and the service looks profesional.
Easy, cheap and 7 days later you have a website. Cool Right?
Behind the scenes process
As soon as you provide all the requested details, the company or freelancer depending on the case, will go on ThemeForest and find a ready made template that will have the design and configuration that you requested and aproved on. One of this themes is between 30-50$, if this is what you want, you could go directly and buy one for yourself and set it up.
Indeed there are a few more steps involved to configure the website, such as:
- configuring email client
- adding specific plugins to add some extra functionality
- add the content, logo, analytics
You will indeed have an online website, you and your customers will receive an email when a purchase is done, you will be able to see the analytics and traffic that might appear.
So you are happy, the company or freelancer is happy for making 600$ in a few hours time. Everybody is happy so why am i writing all this up then?
Quality over quantity
The truth is, building an online business, with excellent website structure, design, and maintaining it is very costly but effective. It can grow your business and expose it to an unlimited amount of people from any part of the world.
It’s something that you can keep growing and growing. If you have a good plan and structure for it, it will make your life much easier and help you pay much less for future upgrades.
If you want a good website, then you must build a good website. Not just to install a template with a cool design…
Website and it’s value
Having a website it’s not having an online business. A website is like an island, with multiple bridges that you have to set up corectly in order to be able to mantain and have a growth for the online business. If any bridge is down, well… your whole online business is down.
What bridges are there?
- Main Design, user focused
- Shop and it’s functionalities
- Blog and it’s social media usability
- Blog Url structure
- Product Url scructure
- Categories Url scructure
- Internal Linking
- Search functionality & Search page usability
- Add to Favourites
- Client Account and Administration area
- Login Page design
- Checkout usability
- Social Media sharing buttons
- Structured data for Social media & Google
- Images, do they have any seo added on them?
- Blog-ing strategy in relation to products
- Products interlinking
- Checkout Page design and usability
- First page
- Popups
- Dmarc & Emails configurations
- SSL
- Redirects & 404 pages
- And the list goes on… This is only for the website part
What type of value do I provide for my services?
For every service that I offer, you will find detailed instructions on how to do it yourself for FREE.
Let’s start with, almost any service that will be delivered will be custom made. I will not use any templates that you can get from anywere else online.
I avoid doing so first of all because of security vulnerabilities that are available in most of them and seccond, is because debuging someone else’s code is not easy. You might expect to get a 10x price for debuging instead of 1x to do it from scratch.
I have created my own custom wordpress theme. First started to work on it in 2019 and it’s growing ever since. It’s a theme built with SEO in mind, user experience and wordpress upgradable. WordPress is evolving fast, and has upgrades every month of so. Because of that i developed a theme that would not be affected by it and it’s built to be expandable.
Each website have a specific set of functionalities needs, because of it, you don’t need the extra 100 other functionalities to slow down your website. That’s why i integrated the option of specific choices into the theme. This way the website is light, fast and only holds your own needs.
For every new functionality i will create custom plugins that are 100% compatible with the theme and 0 vulnerabilities for any other custom functionality. Security of a website is fundamental; there are millions of websites attacks every hour. Each external plugin you add to your WordPress website will add the possibility to come with a vulnerability, making your website a target for hackers.
So what value do I bring for my prices?
- Experience
- Good eye on design
- User friendly
- Quality code
- Vulnerabilities free
- Good structure for your website
- SEO ready
- Content recomandations
- Free information (FAQ, Blog)
What you pay is what you get! It’s not just an old saying.
It’s the value you appreciate your product at.