Surprisingly, the real cost of a good website

A new website should be a celebration but often ends in disappointment in practice. That signboard, into which much time and resources have been invested, is actually not yet complete. During the presentation, the state-of-the-art platform really pops off the screen, but now that your own content has to go on it, things go wrong. Because which texts should you place and are those photos really good? The budget is now spent but the website is not finished, so what now? In short, you realize that you have built a Titanic in terms of technology but only have a 3hp engine behind it. And we all know how the Titanic ended. We see these website issues happening all the time and it made us think: how can this be better? We will tell you, and the outcome will surprise you.

The following illustration shows that the actual costs of a good website have changed quite a bit over the past years. We explain why and how you can take this into account when setting your budget for a new website.

Asking what a website costs is basically the same as asking what a car costs: it depends on what you want. In any case, a good website costs money, and often quite a lot of money. But what exactly are you paying for? Ten years ago, the answer to that question was simple: mostly technology.

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Website Technology

For a layman, nothing is as elusive as the term programming. Writing rules in an obscure language so that a computer knows what to do. And for years, that was the most important thing in creating a website. A good programmer costs ‘a fortune’ and we just accept that because we understand too little about it ourselves.

Years ago, that was also logical. If you wanted to make a website, it had to be built (read: programmed). Want to make changes yourself? Then we build a Content Management System behind it. Want to rank high in the search engine? Then we apply the latest Search Engine Optimization techniques. And that’s not even counting maintenance, hosting, backups, and DNS settings.

So it was very costly to build and maintain the technology of a website. That consumed the lion’s share of the costs and the content was a later concern. And by the way, too many photos didn’t really make a page more user-friendly due to long loading times and small screens.

Some things have changed in this regard.

Website: From Business Card to Communication Channel

I still have them in my inner pocket, the business cards. And every time I give someone my business card, they rummage through their bag or pockets, sometimes embarrassed and sometimes smiling, until one of their last copies surfaces. Still, the business card is one of the first things you have made as a starter, just like the website. It is proof that you exist. That you matter.

Just like the business card, the website was something you made once and then renewed at most every 5 years. But that really ended a few years ago. The internet is no longer a phone book but has become a source of information. The content of the website has therefore become incredibly important and is the factor that determines whether visitors come to your site.

Because the way we move on the internet has also changed; we use Google. And Google is getting better and better at determining which website offers the content you are looking for. The website that Google considers to have the best information often ranks at the top and receives visitors.

To put it briefly: it is becoming increasingly important for companies to have good content on their website:

The quality of a website nowadays is mainly determined by the quality of the content on it.

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The Real Costs of a Good Website

When creating a new website, the catch, as they say, is always in the tail. The then and now situation we described above is the cause of this. Companies spend a (much) too large part of the budget on the technology behind the website instead of the content that determines whether it is actually a good website. A common budget for a new website ranges between € 5,000 and € 25,000. The distribution in our illustration shows what you spend this on.

The follow-up question is of course what good/quality content is. We like to pay attention to this in a separate article.

In this article, we have assumed websites that are mainly made to present your brand, which are probably 99% of websites. Of course, there are also websites with other functions, involving complex algorithms or large databases. Think of Amazon’s website, which naturally contains much more technology and where the proportions are different.