Written by:
2009/01/19 04:31 PM 

The new Year, 2009, has not started out that well in the web development and hosting department. Not much sales going on.

I do web design and web hosting. Specifically I design and host Content Management Systems, CMS, using the Dotnetnuke framework. I believe that my pricing structure is very reasonable and affordable. Admittedly I am not the cheapest, but then again I am not the most expensive.  Problem is that clients can always find a cheaper guy out there.

When I quote people, naturally they would want to compare prices. They use Google to do this. Now this is one time where Google is not your friend. Because Google cannot tell the difference in quality. So what happens is that clients get website hosts and packages presented to them that start at R19 - R50 pm. Now I cannot compete with that. But what many do not realise or investigate, is what you get for R19 pm.

Looking at these incredible cheap hosting plans,  I see why they are so cheap. You get from 1mb - 50mb website space and 50mb -100mb website bandwidth. No website, this you have to develop yourself or have some developer do it for you. Having so little space means that your website will be nothing but a static web brochure.

When it comes to web design, it is even a bigger joke.  Here you will find guys developing and designing websites from as little as R1000 for 3-5 static pages. But once again I cannot compete with this. Doing some more investigation, what is it that you get for your R1000 for 5 pages.

Well, first it is a static website and limited to a maximum of x pages. Static website means that the content has to be changed manually, and you would need to know some HTML in order to do that. Max of 5 pages means that if you need to add a new page, a new product or any other information that requires a new page, then that has to be done manually as well. This means that either you have to do it yourself or hire a web developer to do it for you. These web developers charge anything from R150 to change static content like links, to R220 ph up to and exceeding R500 ph. Otherwise they would charge you sometimes per page, I've seen R1000 per page charges. Sometimes more.

The other thing is that the cheaper web developers can be easily seen. Their design stinks, it still sits in the early '90s. It is web1.0. The graphics are poor and pixelated. The design is basic and very similar looking. Yes you do get what you paid for. We are in 2009, web2.0, dynamic sites, CMS is the flavour of the month. Attractive appealing sites are in. Professionalism in design and structure is what is called for.

At the end of the day choosing a cheaper web developer or web  host over a average or more expensive one, will actually cost you more. You have all heard of the phrase, "peny wise pound foolish". This is very apt when choosing a website design company.

Cheaper R19pm hosts, and R500 3 page web design is ok for personal use. You know, putting up the old family website. But for business, you want to look professional. This is your advertisement for your company, do you want the world and potential clients to think that you're cheap and the products that you sell are cheap and nasty. Your website is an indication of who you are, what type of company you are, what type of service you provide, the quality of your products.

I have written another small article on this topic, you can find it at: Cheap Website Development

What do you think the cost of website development should be? Have you tried one of these so called cheap development packages?

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