Websites come in all shapes, sizes, and costs. And not all websites are created equally. You can easily find cheap websites costing as little as a few hundred dollars to upper-end sites costing $50,000+. There is no standard pricing, and what you get varies greatly.
When you look at the traditional method of website design, typically it is paid for in a 50/50 process. 50% will be paid upfront as a deposit, and the remaining 50% gets paid normally around launch time. With the average cost of a high-quality website being $5000 or more, this can make a serious dent in the cash flow of your small business.
And with such a high price tag, many small-town or very small businesses (I like the phrase micro business), as well as mom-and-pop shops, are the ones that suffer.
As a small business, you don’t have tons of extra cash sitting around. And when you do, many of you will be pumping it into the business for growth, or back to your family for those needs. This often pushes you into the do-it-yourself design model, eating up your precious time.
Enter the monthly website plan. With a monthly website, you get all the benefits of a new high-end site, but at a price tag that better suits the super small businesses. This was one of the main factors in our decision to move to this model. Small businesses like us could afford small payments and be just as successful as the big guys on the web.
So, what are some other benefits to a monthly website that are not as obvious as the small payment?
Lower Business Risk
With a traditional website build, you put all the money in and hope for the best. You are gambling on the results you will get and are stuck with a site that might not be cutting it.
Sure, you can pay even more and keep making changes. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could get those changes made as you needed them? With our monthly plans, we include our care services. This handles the hosting nightmare and allows you to get changes made.
We can take that update time and adjust the site to increase performance or edit content, so your site continues to get in front of the right people. And considering search engines are constantly changing, that monthly plan gives you peace of mind in keeping up with those changes.
The investment you and your business are making is distributed over time and able to be paid for by the business you receive from it. You don’t have to borrow or cut costs just to grow on the web.
Future Ready
The internet is ever-evolving. This means that the design and needs of your audience are changing as well.
When you purchase a website as a one-off job, that site will be a snapshot in time. As website design evolves or plugins change inside the site, you are stuck in time or risk something breaking. This is not the case with monthly website plans.
Your monthly plan includes all the needed site maintenance, and every site gets our attention each month. When plugins update and make breaking changes, we are on it. When the links you had to some other resource changed, we’ve got your back. When a new technology comes out to make your site able to load faster, we update the site and include it.
Your site is never a static image from years ago in time. It evolves and grows with you. Heck, you could even jump on a new build every two years and go with a completely fresh look if you wanted. The costs are spaced out and planned, giving you a future-proof site in a way you can budget for.
Quick Turnaround
The average build for a website takes 6-12 weeks. This was a problem we wanted to overcome. Small businesses can’t afford to sit on their hands for weeks hoping to grow sometime in the future.
The largest hang-up for a site is content. Both photos and text take time to write and gather. And some agencies just leave you hanging to come up with the content on your own. We wanted to fix this and make the build time faster and gathering time shorter.
To assist you with your content journey, we have detailed guides that walk you through creating some content for your business. In addition, we can help you with adjusting the content you come up with to match your audience. Lastly, we can help you find a good website copywriter, who can write the content for you if you don’t have time.
To make the build process faster, we have found tools to make our collaboration easy. You can give feedback, and we build on your site in real-time. Skipping the whole concept of “wireframing” and mockups, we can build your site in a way that you can see what it will actually look like and get it right this first time.
All this together has dropped our build times to under 6 weeks. We have even had sites on our monthly plans take as little as a week when they had most of their content ready.
An immediate return
With a quick build time, and no extra savings involved, your business can start getting results from the new website in less time. Rather than paying out a huge amount to hope for a return someday, you can start making sales or booking more service calls immediately.
And following along those lines, search engines can start visiting the new site, and start sending you more customers faster.
Of course, you can’t gauge that return if you don’t have some way to track it. To ensure you can see your results, each site build also includes analytics. The analytics allow you to see who is visiting, and what content is working for them.
This loop of monitoring – feedback – adjust allows your site to grow fast and reach exactly the people you need. You will know exactly where your dollars are going and what benefits you are getting.
We got your back
Traditional web design often brings you on board, builds the site, and then shoves you out the door so they can start on the next project. This is exactly the opposite of a monthly build.
Our relationship with our customers is extremely important. And since you are paying a monthly amount, we continue to build that relationship. From weekly business tips to care services.
And speaking of care services, this is where you can get peace of mind and warranty-style coverage on your site. If we build a feature, we are prepared to cover that feature and keep it working. If the site breaks, we fix it. Not just for two weeks, but the entire lifetime of the plan.
Being a small business is hard enough. You need to be able to offload some of the stress. A monthly website plan allows you to offload the website stress and management. Saving you time and helping you grow is the goal. We are not successful if you fail.
Wrap Up
Monthly builds have some decent advantages over a traditional build. And some advantages are different for each business. Some like the hands-off approach, and others like the low upfront cost.
A monthly plan gives your small business options. And sometimes that is exactly what you need.
Hop on over to our web design page to learn more about our builds or get started today by scheduling a free consultation.
