Company business websites development and programming is essential part of business presentation online. It usually includes specific functional and content part, requested by the client. The functional and content part usually set the cheapest price for a business website, but there are many additional options that may increase the requirements and make the website multiple times more expensive.
Company business websites – goals
A business website has some written or unwritten business and/or marketing goals, that needs to fulfil. The specific goals vary from business to business, but if your business depend on Internet – it’s likely you are very dependent of your website performance and results.
When your company and business success depend a lot on your website, you set more goals to be achieved. The goals should be prioritized – they are not the same weight, as some are more important and have more impact on sales, growth and so on. Here are few example goals for a company business website:
- Contact information – it’s like a business card in Internet and you can also put your website URL on your printed business cards
- Services presentation – our website is a great example, we describe the services and what the client could expect
- Products presentation
- Customized products orders
- For online stores:
- Product and/or services orders/sales
- Receiving online payments
- CRM-like system for customers’ orders management and email notifications
Company business websites – options
Depending of the business goals that need to be fulfilled, business website development may need additional services included and each additional service adds more time to the project and makes it more expensive (raises the total price). For example:
- If your site is not only informative about your services, products and your company, but also need to have different forms – contact form, order form, inquiry form and so on – it takes time to be developed, set up and tested.
- If you need to receive online payments, then you may have different payment gateways – PayPal, Stripe, Skrill and many more. Every method needs time, skills and knowlledge to be set up, developed and tested. Real tests are also needed, so the tests take more time that testing design changes for example.
- If we use a standard template design, instead of custom/unique web design – you save money. If you need branding, then you need (unique/custom) web and graphic design elements, and perhaps you may have some colors limitations, depending on your existing logo and brand…
- If you have services and products, which are usually searched in the search engines like Google, then you can target the users searching in Google in two ways: via paid cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns and using SEO optimization for your website (to receive free organic targeted traffic). Please note, the traffic from organic search is free (you don’t pay for these visitors directly), but the SEO optimization process could take months (or even years, depending on the SEO strategy) and this work could cost you hundreds euro/US dollars (for low traffic phrases only), thousands (the usual spending for few words for few months) or tens of thousands (for high traffic phrases, for few months/years…).
- Advertising and SEO optimization could drive traffic, but your website may need further optimization for speed and handling high traffic peaks. It just need to work fast enough and without breaks (if possible). When it isn’t optimized, the hosting company could temporary suspend your account, due to too much resources usage. They could request to pay 3x, 5x or 10x more (for a VPS hosting), because of high server load and resources usage.
As can be seen from the examples above, business website development is a complex process, with individual needs and requirements for each company, so the price could vary a lot – from few hundreds to few tens of thousands Euro or US dollars.
Company business websites needs continuous improvement
When a website goes live, even if web design is really great, always there is something more, that could be further improved. Sometimes it’s UI ans UX design and experience; sometimes it’s the content – texts, images, photos and videos; sometimes the navigation for mobile version (under mobiles and tablets) could be further improved. We should decide whether it’s worth it or not.
When your website sells your services or products, you may need Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). You may want to investigate how your visitors interact with the website to find out if there are some weak elements, that result in losing potential clients or customers. That is investigation and analysis – you can do this yourself, but usually a more experienced specialist or expert would make more detailed analysis and conclusions (prioritized conclusions – most important proposed changes are on top).