Surprising: the Real Costs of a Good Website

Getting a new website should be a celebration, but in practice, it often ends in disappointment. That showcase into which much time and resources have been poured is not yet complete. During the presentation, the state-of-the-art platform truly explodes off the screen, but now that your own content needs to be added, things go awry. What texts should you place, and are those photos suitable? The budget is now spent, but the website is not finished, so what now? In short, you discover that technically you’ve built a Titanic, but it’s powered by only a 3hp engine. And we all know what happened to the Titanic. These issues with websites are something we see all the time and it made us think: how can this be done better? We’ll tell you, and the outcome may surprise you.

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

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

Technology of a Website

For a layperson, nothing is as elusive as the term “programming.” Creating rules in an obscure language so a computer knows what to do. And for many years, that was the most important aspect of realizing a website. A good programmer costs “an arm and a leg,” and we just have to take their word for it since we hardly understand it ourselves.

Years ago, that made sense. If you wanted to create a website, it had to be built (read: programmed). Want to make changes yourself? Then we’ll build a Content Management System for it. Want to rank high in the search engine? Then we’ll apply the latest Search Engine Optimization techniques. And we haven’t even talked about maintenance, hosting, backups, and DNS settings yet.

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

Things have changed in this regard.

Website: From Business Card to Communication Channel

I still have them in my pocket, the business cards. And every time I give someone my business card, they, sometimes embarrassed and sometimes laughing, fumble in their bag or pockets until one of their last copies surfaces. Yet, like a website, the business card is one of the first tools you create as a startup. It’s proof that you exist. It matters.

Like the business card, the website was something you made once and then only updated every 5 years at most. But that came to an end a few years ago. The internet is no longer just a phone book but has become a source of information. The content of the website has become incredibly important and is the factor that determines whether visitors come to your site.

Because the way we navigate the internet has also changed; we use Google. And Google is getting better at determining which website provides the content you’re looking for. The website that, according to Google, contains the best information is often at the top and receives visitors.

To put it bluntly, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to have good content on their website:

The quality of a website is now primarily determined by the quality of the content it hosts.

The Real Cost of a Good Website

When realizing a new website, the devil, as they say, is always in the details. The then and now situation we describe above is the cause of this. Companies spend too much of their budget on the technology behind the website rather than the content that determines whether it’s actually a good website. A typical budget for a new website ranges between €5,000 and €25,000. The distribution from our illustration shows where this is spent.

The follow-up question is, of course, what good/quality content is. We’ll happily dedicate a separate article to this.

In this article, we’ve focused on websites primarily made to present your brand, which probably accounts for 99% of websites. Of course, there are also websites with other functions, involving complicated algorithms or large databases. Consider Amazon’s website, which involves much more technology, and therefore the ratios differ.