Super Cool Sites, Inc.

Post author By David Kauffman
Post date December 5, 2012

Time is Money

What does a website cost?

By Nancy Herbert, Super Cool Sites, Inc.

We often get the question of “How much does a website cost?”, I decided to do a little research around the country sampling various website design companies to come up with a current cost estimate. Based on my research, the following information is current as of December 2012. If you have any comments please let me know, I would love to get your input.

Every business needs a website. It doesn’t matter if you are a national corporation or a small local business. Just like different businesses, different websites can serve various purposes and can vary in cost and quality depending on design and functional complexity.

With so many website design companies out there, a lot of design variety and skill diversity is available. With this comes a variety of pricing structures. Here are my findings:

Basic Website – $1,000-$2,000

A basic design website acts as an online brochure. It is not advised to go for less, or the quality will suffer. It will usually be a template site and will have the same look as many other sites on the web. This type of site will showcase your business. It will work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It will answer potential customer’s questions, and offer information about the company’s products and services. A basic website doesn’t allow you to interact via social networking or blogs, carry out business transactions on your site, or allow you to change or update your site pages without hiring a professional to do it for you. Search engine optimization (SEO) will be included for ranking success, and web analytics is provided for tracking web success.

Custom Website – $2,500-$7,000

A custom website is beautifully designed to meet your marketing needs. Design elements are created and designed specifically for your company and site. You will usually not find features of audience interactivity, ecommerce or content management. There will be an increase in cost due to the amount of hours needed to create a one-of-a-kind design. This type of site will take more time to build because it will include CSS and XHTML coding in order for the website to look the same on every computer or interface. It will also be search engine optimized (SEO) for ranking better in keyword searches, and web analytics will be included to track and insure web success.

Content Management System (CMS) Website – $3,000-$8,500

The average cost of a CMS website is $5,700, depending on the needs and customization. These websites have fantastic custom design and functionality, including the ability to manage and update content, photos and text within site pages. They are designed to be “user friendly.” Instead of paying someone else to make these basic changes, a CMS system allows you to do so without coding or web design knowledge. This type of site also can include the ability to become “social” through blogging. Some ecommerce sites can be created in this dollar range as well. This price range also includes CSS and XHTML coding, search engine optimization for better ranking, and web analytics tracking.

Additional Custom Website – $15,000-$100,000

These are highly customized, complex, functionally advanced sites. They include social networking, advanced blogging, ecommerce and leading design features. There are a limited number of web design companies that can accomplish this type of website and they will charge premium fees. These sites are coded from scratch and require months of analysis, research, consulting, database design, and implementation and site testing. Sites like Facebook.com and BestBuy.com are good examples.

Website design truly is a service in which “you get what you pay for,” and it is not an area in which you can afford to cut corners. The decision to hire a web design company should not be a price focused one, but return on investment focused.

Sign Up

SEO

SEO Link Building

Post author By David Kauffman
Post date November 6, 2012

Link building is getting other websites to have a link to your website. This is a very important strategy in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and applies to a website or blog. It isn’t enough to get your website up live and hope someone finds you. You have to work to get traffic to your site. SEO link building can help do this for you. A lot of links on your site tells Google your website is a quality website with good content and helps with your page rank. The links however must be good quality links. A smaller amount of good quality links is better than a ton of low quality links.

Link building takes time and patience. There are many things you can do yourself to build links. Looking for something free to help you with link building? Jon Cooper an SEO consultant spent over 15 hours creating a very large, complete list of 200 link building strategies. He even categorized the strategies, gave them a time frame and a link value from low, to moderate, to high. http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies For anyone who wants to try doing their own link building this is a valuable and free resource. Some strategies take a lot of time and others not so much. Using this resource to get good links and more traffic to your website means more money for you.

If this takes more time than you have or want to spend on the task, you can always pay someone to do it for you. Whichever way you chose this strategy should not be ignored.

Sign Up

Stories

How Super Cool Sites was started

Post author By David Kauffman
Post date November 2, 2012

How Super Cool Sites was Started

How I got into the Website Design and Internet Marketing Service.

This business came upon me in a time of crisis. My insurance brokerage company had taken major battering from the top Health Insurance Companies in the state. I had 9 agents selling health insurance for individuals, families and small groups. We advertised via Yellow pages, Radio and TV. We represented over 50 insurance companies, and would do anything in order to get our clients the best possible coverage at the lowest possible price.

I thought this would be a great formula for success. I didn’t take into consideration that the insurance companies were actually holding all the cards. Yes, I had contracts that stated our agency commissions, but these were changed. It didn’t affect everything immediately, but as each case renewed for the year, the commissions were cut by up to 80%.

It didn’t take long for the agents to realize they couldn’t continue on this path. We went from one of the largest health producing agencies in the state to a single person operation in the matter of 3 years.

Starting Fresh

Although I had spent over 30 years in the insurance business, I wanted to find something different. I wanted something that was totally in my control and not some large company.

I always had loved computers. I got the first Atari computer with a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk. I kept stepping up as they came out. Next was the Commodore 64, then the 128. I bought the first personal IBM with a hard drive, a whopping 20 megabyte disk.

The reason I loved computers so much was that they never forget anything. It’s like an extension of your brain with perfect memory. Anything I wanted to remember, just put it in the computer, then I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

Looking for something with more certainty

So when I started searching for something to do that I controlled, computers and the internet were at the top of my list. I contacted a company called WSI. They had the “bestselling” franchise available for website design. This was in 2003. After looking into this extensively, I partnered up with a person in my area that had already paid for the franchise, but had not sold any websites. He knew the technical side of the business, but needed help in selling the product. Since he already paid the $50,000 franchise fee, I thought this would be a good opportunity to see how I like the operation. He agreed to partner with me and split profits 50/50. This worked pretty well for the first year. But once I learned a lot about the business I realized we didn’t need WSI for anything. They were charging much more than was necessary and adding a lot of franchise fees. My partner didn’t want to quit with WSI, so we decided to part ways.

The Birth of Super Cool Sites!

Thus, Super Cool Sites, Inc. was born. We started with flash templates, and WOW did they look GOOD. They were blowing away everything else on the web for looks and animation. Who didn’t want one of these to represent their company on the Internet?

But it didn’t take long to realize, there is a lot more involved in building a successful website than having a cool looking design. You have to get people to your website, through the hundreds of different ways possible, and then you had to get them to interact with the website by contacting the website owner or buying their products or services on-line. That sounds simple enough, but when you are competing against thousands or even millions of people, it can be a daunting task. You need an expert for every step of the process. This is how Super Cool Sites, Inc. was started and is flourishing today.

Randy Kauffman
President, SCS