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So, you need a website? Part I: Representing your business online

A website is a great tool for any business, and many customers take it for granted that they will be able to find out basic information about you online. Beyond this, a website can become a brand-building engine, a place to create a community, a retail outlet for your produce, or even a money-making product in itself, such as online services like dating or auction sites. It's hard to know what to look for and what to pay, so we're trying to make things clearer.

This guide is the first in a series on the Incodius blog that will help explain what you actually pay for when you have a site built, and what sort of site will work for you. We like to keep what we do as transparent as possible, and we understand that many people who need sites don't know the first thing about how the process of having a site built actually works.

A basic business site, or 'brochure' site.

A brochure site is a low-maintenance website that can impress potential customers through good design and concise content, and give your business a convincing online presence. If you need a website purely for customers to pop in and see what you do, how you do it and what it will look like, a brochure site is what most web development companies will recommend. Typically these sites are easy to give a price estimate for, and are built for a set rate, with additional extras such as custom image galleries or interactive areas as extra costs.

Your new website?
Photo:Incodius

The key thing to consider for these sites is whether you want to be able to edit the  text or images on the site yourself. If you want the information to change frequently, or want to avoid future costs associated with asking the web company you hired to change the site, you will want a CMS (content management system). These come in all shapes and sizes, and some are quite complex and can be confusing if you're 'not a computer person'. At Incodius we custom build CMSs, so they never have confusing parts you won’t need, unlike other companies who use free (open source) CMS software that is created by others, such as Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. A website that doesn't have a CMS is usually called a 'static' site, because from a developer's point of view it has no programming code and no database, and as opposed to 'dynamic' sites which have these extra features to power CMSs and other interactivity. Static sites are cheaper to build, but you need an experienced web person to change any text or images, and this can add costs down the line.

In New Zealand at present, you can get a brochure site up for anywhwere between $0 and $7,500+. The zero dollar option is to start a Blogger blog or similar free website, and create your site there. The downside is that many people know that this is not a professional website; your site may be forced to include advertising for other services that you have no choice over; and also it will take time to set it up - your time. In contrast, with the $7,500 option you will get a professional-quality website, but you are paying a premium for the web company’s 'market leader' status and large development team. While this would be critical if you were building the next Facebook-scale billion-user web application, it will have very little benefit for your brochure site. The Christchurch company who charges the most for brochure sites uses the same open-source CMS as many much cheaper companies, they simply customise a template for your business, which is quite a quick process, and the rest of your money is pure profit. More realistically, many other New Zealand web companies will charge between $500 and $2,000 for a brochure site, depending on functionality.

At Incodius, we tailor-make brochure sites to customer’s needs, but start from an initial platform that we've created ourselves and used extensively - our own site incodius.co.nz uses it too. Our basic brochure site with five pages and a custom design and layout begins at $650* +GST, or $750* +GST with CMS (and for this small price difference, we highly recommend being able to manage your own content!). If you're a tiny startup with almost no cashflow yet, we can create a 'placeholder' site (a quick, one page site with your logo and contact details) including purchasing the domain name and the first month's hosting for under $100* +GST, which will serve as a notice of how to get in touch by email or phone until a time when you can afford to set a real site up. Generally, full brochure sites can be built in just a few days, depending on our work queue and how much content you have ready to go (information about your business, logos, etc). The reason that it's less expensive with Incodius is that you just pay for the services that go straight into your site, and you get better value for money with our small team.

Other things to consider when you're starting a new site are hosting costs (at Incodius, hosting for this kind of site is just $10 a month*, and we can often offer some kind of free hosting initially for new customers who ask nicely). A domain name (your website address, eg www.incodius.co.nz) for your site usually costs around $27.95 plus GST, and we can purchase and configure that for you, or you can buy one yourself, unless you have one already. Also, we'll take into account whether you have an existing site to use as a starting point, or have existing design work. Both of these can reduce the costs further in some circumstances.

If you're interested in getting in touch with us about creating an online presence for your business, click here to view our contact page.

*These are the current prices as of 21/07/2010, and may no longer be current when you read this, please check with us to find out our current prices.