Crikey, how much?

“Wow, that’s cheap, what is the matter with it?”

How often does a product or service’s low cost actually set alarm bells ringing in your head?

If something seems too cheap, it often suggests that something is amiss. But why is this dependent on the type of product or service on offer?

If someone goes to a second-hand car dealer with a budget around £15,000, they usually have an idea of the car that they can purchase, and if someone suggests their friend’s used car for, say, £500, they’d dismiss it as it won’t be what they’re looking for. But they are both cars, right? Well, obviously they are different.

Well, we have quoted for websites, and the prospective client has said they can get it for, quite literally, over 20 times cheaper.

Unlike the person looking for a car above, the person looking for a website thinks that they are comparing apples with apples, when they are most definitely not.

We have seen some web projects where the cost of the entire project would cost more than either the specification or quality control phases of our build. What does that say about the end product?

The truth is that cheap websites don’t work. They don’t show up in search engines. They don’t convert users into customers. They are just there, existing.

A decent agency will get to understand their client, and their client’s clients, and make sure that they are shown what they need in order to buy or make contact. A decent web agency will make sure the website works on all browsers and doesn’t have a technical glitch at a crucial moment. A decent agency will consider reliability, scalability, and security. All this comes at a cost, and needs experience and attention to detail.

“Our website looks OK, but we don’t get any enquiries from it.” Well, yes — you’ve gone with the lowest cost option, what did you expect? Think back to the £500 car…

The initial cost is always going to be a factor — we get that — but the return on investment is more important.

Don’t believe it is just with simple websites either; people make the same mistake with development and coding. We often have to invest countless hours patching up and fixing code, at a large cost to our clients, because they have taken a shortcut and found a cheap off-shore developer.

And these are the lucky clients. Several times, we have had to explain that what they have purchased is useless. One example that springs to mind is a client who gave us an online shop that was “nearly finished” and “just needs a shopping cart”. However, the developer had hard-coded all of the pages and products: there was no product database, no user accounts, no login, and no payment gateway. Apart from a dubious website design, it was of no use at all and had to be scrapped.

This happens more often than you’d think, and recently we’ve seen an influx of instances where people are using cheaper ‘developers’ who are using AI to create a solution, and expect it to be a simple task to bring their solution up to par… it’s not.

Choosing the cheapest solution may help cash flow now, but as soon as it starts turning away customers it’ll suddenly become a financial burden. Not only that, you’ll lose trust, chip away at your reputation, and get bad word of mouth. These negative thoughts will take much longer to overcome.

With development projects, you’ll end up in technical debt with a dated system that is soon obsolete. In these cases, a simple cheap fix can end up becoming a financial burden.

Your staff can make or break your company, and you most certainly wouldn’t recruit with their cost being the most influential factor — that would be corporate suicide. Your website is the same. It is often the face or backbone of your company and is worth getting correct.

So, next time you get quotes for professional services, make sure to question “how much” not only for the expensive options, but also the cheap ones, because it’s not the initial cost that costs you money in the long term!

We are Webbed Feet — we do things properly.