Getting a new website for your business is an investment, not a cost. You need to be in this mindset before getting started.
Perhaps you’re a a start up business dipping their toes in the digital world, or one who already has a functioning company, but their website could do better in obtaining leads or evergreen sales. And now you don’t know how or where to start?
At Reddy, we’re here to support you and literally do it all for you if you like! But we need to set the expectations of what we need from you to begin on your project, and what we’ll need throughout the process.
In this post we’ll go through some top things to consider before getting a new website or revamping your current one.
Some of this may seem a bit blunt, though we believe in setting your expectations on how we can promptly deliver you a website you’ve always dreamed about. Getting it all out in the open right from the start will help your project get delivered smoothly with as little bumps and unexpected roadblocks as possible.
Your budget
Our websites start from £350, for a simple single page website. It’s worth getting a free quote from us to discuss your project in detail as we will also be able to suggest ideas and alternatives.
To begin your project, we’ll require a 50% up front payment for us to start the designs right away.
A good website is never finished so be prepared to funnel back in some of your ROI, to expand further. Because once a website is launched, it won’t deliver results on it’s own.
Check out our maintenance post, here for a little more guidance on tech and security updates, as well as ideas for additions you could add to your website project as a ‘phase 2’.
Aside from your website design and build, you will need to consider other costs and subscriptions. Here are a few examples. Costs below will vary depending on the size and complexity of your website:
- Purchasing a domain – From £5 per year
- Website hosting – From £7 per month
- CRM tools – Free to paid per month, depending package plans
- Plugin tools – Free to paid per month, depending on package plans
- Maintenance – One off costs, which work out cheaper if you are frequent
- New website features – Varied one off costs, depending on the request
- Copy writers – Varied one off costs, for SEO maintenance, landing pages or blog posts
Your time
We appreciate that there’s a lot to juggle these days. Though we need you specifically for these stages of the project:
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- Discussing your requirements, to provide you with a quote.
- Presenting you with the design, whereby we’ll need constructive feedback to get you a prompt sign off so that we may start web development work.
- Time to review your working demo website, and input content if necessary.
- A meeting to train you before or after launch, on how to use the website.
Should you take too long to respond to us, this will delay the launch of your website. In some circumstances, it could mean that we’ll have to book you back into our schedule for further works amongst our other clients; as we only work on one website at a time.
Your content
We appreciate that at times, writing content for your website can take longer than originally expected but we’ll still be around to support you, train you and get your website live.
If your main content is not ready for the design phase of your project, we can use dummy text and stock imagery to keep things moving at a good pace. During this time (if you are supplying the content yourself) then we recommend you start writing up your page copy and blog copy on word documents, so that it can be easily copy and pasted into the website once it’s ready to do so.
If you have a particularly content heavy website or perhaps one with ecommerce functionalities, we can discuss writing content or uploading products for you within your quote.
With imagery, it’s better to launch a website with your own photos as this is when you’ll get the most traffic to your website; when announcing and promoting it’s launch. Therefore it’s better to have a folder of your own imagery we can use – which you can share this with us via Google Drive for example.
If you aren’t in a position to use your own photos, stock imagery is absolutely fine, though we may require a licence fee to remove watermarks from them if they are not free images.
Your vision
It’s great when we’re provided with examples of websites that our clients like the look of and would like to use as inspiration. We certainly won’t copy them, but it gives us an idea of what you like.
“I’ll know it when I see it” just means we’re stabbing in the dark and may need to design numerous revisions until you’re happy. With additional revisions, we have a fair use policy and would charge for the time.
*This is the same for other design aspects, such as logo design or brochures.
We would even welcome your own rough sketches and multiple website examples (or just specific aspects of them) so that we can put together a mood board of inspiration.
Your willingness to learn
Not as important if you’ve got others to own the website for you however we strongly recommend you take the time to learn about your new website and how it works. For example, everyone is responsible for their online security. You wouldn’t purchase a car without knowing how to drive it, check the oil or put air in the tyres.
Knowing how to edit your basic content on your website will also give you the confidence to grow your website by publishing more SEO rich content and understanding how your new ideas could integrate with your website. It also means you can scale back on your costs by doing this for yourself.
Of course we aren’t saying you should learn how to code or know what all the jargon means, but learning the basics of your own website (your business investment!) should be important to you.
We’ve written lots of helpful posts for you to read up on should you wish to get started early!