Why am I getting completely different quotes for a website?

Wow, what a big question and often one thats answered with a LOT of bs. See the following 5 points that decide the price of a website to give you a rough estimate on what to expect.

1. What do you want to achieve?? Are you a local business that just wants to appear in Townsville? Or are you a mid sized business that wants to appear in search results all over Australia?

2. Another factor that helps to determine the price of a website is if there is a need for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a way to get your website appearing better in search engines like Google and Bing. Depending on the nature of the business, this can often be achieved by using blogs. Blogs are an important part of a website because it provides lots of content that Google loves. Although this is only one part of search engine optimization, you can see how this would affect the price dramatically if there is a need to have three or four blog posts written every month requiring five to six hours of work. 

3. Hosting. Hosting is another important part of website design because it is where the website lives. There is a separate article on our website around website hosting but overall if it's hosted in a good data center which is fast and easy for Google to find, you will rank better but you will also pay more as an ongoing cost. 

4. If search engine optimization is important, then the amount of pages is also something that can affect the price. Depending on your niche market we often have customers coming to us and asking us to build the website which will appear on Page 1, however they don't have the capital to pay for that rank. The reason for this is because page one rank for a competitive market might have websites with over 2000 pages of content. Again if the business owner is not willing to write this content or send us pictures and details, we then need to pay our content writer to write that which is going to affect the price.

5. Advertising. Although there are varying degrees of advertising budgets, it is quite common for businesses in Australian towns like Townsville QLD to invest in Google advertising. Google advertising does not have a fixed price and you pay for clicks, meaning that if you want 50 clicks to your website per month or do you want 2000 clicks to your website per month will affect the price that you pay. 

Do prices change regularly?

That question can be broken down into 2 main categories.
1. Do website agencies change their prices? 
At Web Design Townsville, we don't up our prices. Although we may have different offers running and the average cost of a website will go up over the years, we do not change the plan you start on. So if you have a plan that costs $70/month AUD, you can sleep easy and night knowing that price is not going to change suddenly. However, you might come back to our website in 12 months time and find that they have been increased to $75/month. There are thousands of reasons to start the website design journey - but for nothing else its a worthwhile investment. $70/month today will become a better and better deal as time goes on. If the business is running for 20 years, this will be very affordable in 2041. All successful businesses think about these future decisions now and know that dominating the online market takes time - Google does not reward instant websites with no ongoing work!

2. Do prices change in the web design industry? 
Yes. Prices often change in the industry because of lots of factors. The most noticable changes that impact the industry are changing technologies and the increase of freelancer website builders. At Townsville Web Design, we have seen the market change in ways that have ongoing impact. Mostly there has been an increase in website designer freelancers. This creates lots of competition which often ends up reducing quality. We aim to provide higher quality websites than the ones you find on freelancer websites like Fiver (see our blog on why you shouldn't use services like Fiver). There are also aspects like changing technologies which play a role on web design. For example, Google regularly updates its algorithms to include things like backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to yours, so when this became an important factor in Google ranking, website agencies started to focus more time and effort on building backlink strategies for websites. This takes longer to do and therefore increased cost.