Ask three people in Kenya to quote for a website and you may get three figures with nothing in common. One is the price of a good lunch. One is the price of a second-hand car.
Both of them said "a website".
No wonder business owners find this confusing. The word covers everything from a single page with your phone number to an online shop that runs your whole sales operation. The price differs because the work differs.
We are not going to give you a number here, because any honest number depends on what you need. What we can do is show you what you are paying for, so you can tell a fair quote from a poor one.
First, what is the website for?
This is the question that decides most of the cost, and it is often skipped.
- To show you exist. A few pages saying who you are, what you do and how to reach you.
- To bring in enquiries. Pages written and designed to persuade a visitor to call, message or fill in a form.
- To sell. A catalogue, a basket, payments and delivery.
- To let customers do something. Book an appointment, check a balance, track an order, apply for a place.
Each step up involves more thinking, more building and more testing. A quote that does not ask which of these you want is a guess.
What you are paying for
Design. Someone has to decide how the site looks and, more importantly, how a visitor finds what they came for. A site built from a ready-made template costs less than one designed around your business. Templates are fine for many purposes, but they look like what they are.
Content. Words and pictures. This is the part most often forgotten and most often late. Who is writing the text? Who is supplying the photographs? If the answer is "you will send them", plan for that to take longer than you expect.
Building. Turning the design into something that works on every phone, loads quickly and does not break. Speed matters more here than in many places, because a large share of your visitors will be on mobile data. We wrote about that in Built for a Bad Connection.
Features. Anything beyond showing information: contact forms, bookings, payments, customer accounts, a way to update the site yourself. M-Pesa payments in particular take careful work to do properly.
Being found. A website nobody can find is a brochure in a drawer. The basics of search visibility, such as sensible page titles, fast loading and clear structure, should be part of the build and not an extra.
The costs that come afterwards
This is where the cheap quote and the fair quote tend to part ways.
- Domain name. Your address on the internet, renewed every year.
- Hosting. Where the site lives. Cheap hosting is often slow and sometimes unreliable.
- Security and updates. Software needs maintaining. Sites that are left alone get broken into.
- Changes. New prices, new staff, new services. Who makes them, and what does each change cost?
- Support. When the site is down on a Monday morning, who answers?
Ask for these in writing. A low price for the build followed by a charge for every small change is a common arrangement, and not a pleasant one to discover later.
How to compare two quotes
Put them side by side and check that they describe the same thing.
- How many pages, and who writes them?
- Is the design made for us or adapted from a template?
- Will I be able to update it myself?
- Is it built to work well on phones first?
- What is included for the first year, and what will the second year cost?
- Who owns the website, the domain and the content when it is finished?
That last question matters a great deal. We have met businesses that could not move their own website because the domain was registered in a developer's name. Make sure everything is yours.
When cheap is expensive
A site that takes ten seconds to load on a phone loses most of its visitors before they see anything. A site that cannot be updated goes out of date within months. A site that goes down and cannot be fixed, because the person who built it has moved on, has to be paid for twice.
None of this means you must buy the most expensive option. It means the right question is not "what does it cost?" but "what will it do for the business, and for how long?"
A website is not a cost to get as low as possible. It is a member of staff who works every hour of the day.
Our view
Start with what you need the site to achieve, and spend in proportion to that. A new business may be well served by something small, clear and fast. A business that takes orders online should treat its website as seriously as its premises.
If you would like an honest conversation about what your business needs, and what it does not, get in touch. You can also see how we work and some of what we have built.
