10/08/2024
I have a friend who shared an absolute marketing horror story with me today and I feel like I need to address it.
Before launching his business, my friend needed a website built. The company gladly accepted his business for a flat fee of several thousand dollars and eventually delivered the finished site. Once the site was finished, the company would contact my friend and say things like, "Your server is about to crash and you need to upgrade to the premium tier in order to keep your website up and running." and then subsequently charge an additional several thousand dollars to mitigate the supposed issue.
This went on for some time, with a variety of different "dire situations" that ultimately required more money to fix. After about a year, my friend added up all of the money spent on the website and it came out to over $30,000.00.
I might be shooting myself in both feet here, but every single person reading this post has the capability of building and managing your own website. It's time consuming and tedious, but you can certainly do it. Your domain registration is roughly $11.00 per year, and web hosting can cost as little as $38 per month. If you WANT a webmaster to help with monthly upkeep, that's perfectly fine, but it should never cost you more than ~$500.00/month for site management.
If you are in the market for a new website and you receive a quote from someone, please let me take a look and make sure you're not getting screwed. This post is predominantly geared towards smaller local businesses. Obviously if you're running a website with thousands of daily visitors, your costs will inevitably increase, but for a local business, a website should NEVER cost $30,000.00.
Sorry to rant, but I had to put this out there. There are companies that will tell you their SEO is the best and that your page will pop up first on Google, and then try to charge you a premium for it. They'll say they have to write ten thousand lines of code to add a FAQ section to your website and invoice you $2,000.00. These companies are relying on the assumption that you don't have a deep education in web development so they can sell you stuff you don't actually need, or drastically upcharge you for the things you do need.
Always feel free to reach out to me if you have questions or concerns about web development. I would be thrilled to teach you how to build and manage your own website and just cut out the middle man entirely.
Stay vigilant.
Eric
