This is just as much a useful question as the common “How much does a website cost?” – In reality, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I’m not going to delve into how to apportion cost to features here, but I will shed light on how you can ask a more specific question when looking for a service supplier.
What type of website do I want?
I think there are the following kinds of site (exclusing specific niche sites like, say, Twitter):
- Brochure
- Sales – products
- Sales – services
- Information/Agenda
- Portfolio
So which one is for you? Let’s look…
Brochure
This is great for general duty shop window stuff. The most lean of all the types, it generally has contact details, description of services and perhaps offers and so forth. It suits things like restaurants for example.
Sales – products
E-commerce, plain and simple. You want to list products (physical or intangible) and have people pay for them, perhaps with some extra features like customer support and potentially articles.
Sales – services
A little more tricky to get the content right, as you have to be concise enough to keep the interest of your potential customer, but provide enough information about yourself to promote yourself and gain trust, these sites are important to get right.
Information/Agenda
These can cover a wide range of topics, but are generally for the same reason – to promote an idea or piece of information. Whether it be a religious or politican agenda, or just a small blog about yourself, they’re commonly at their most popular when they have fresh new content regularly to keep people motivated to return.
Portfolio
Simple. You can be a make up artist, or a wedding photographer (or just about anything else) and you want to display your talent with a view to promoting yourself. Generally relatively plain and simple, focussing on the content and not the design, these can really help you stand out.
What do I want my website to do?
Gain sales? Drive an agenda? Make you easier to locate or contact? If you know the purpose of your website – and believe me, there are plenty of poeple who buy websites without knowing this – then it’s a lot easier for the service supplier to fulfil your need first time.
So now you have an idea what you want and what you wan it to do, you can shop around asking intelligent questions