Miss a renewal or get hacked and you have additional charges and fee’s, many get caught out.

So budget between £25-30 / per annum per name and on average most companies need 4. When you add this up the average cost is now £100.00/year and $1,000.00 over the next 10 years. Daily we need £0.27 pence, or in USD 32 cents a day.

Now we have the domain and we can start to get that site underway…

You will need to locate or “Host” your future site. Several options are available and can include services. Services are the skills, time and money to have the work done by the Hosting company, “PACKAGE DEAL”.

A Hosting package can work for an entry level “First Time” owner, that has no real ability to create or manage the site. You can always teach your self the skills needed and manage the site with as little as 40-50 hours tuition and as many hours of mistakes and fails.

Self builds are always the most expensive option, as every step of this project is a learning curve and just when you feel you are doing it, “boom” the site disappears or something undoes all your work. You forgot to backup, designed a “Slider” that was no longer supported or any of the over 2000 issues talked about on forums that show “self build” is a nightmare waiting to happen.

In 30+ years of website projects I have never meet a single person who has it right, with a site that we could not build for 50% in one 10th of that time.

So choosing your Web and Digital partner is the smartest thing in this industry, who has 10+ years of experience, real skills in delivery and does what they promise on-time and on-budget.

But choosing the right partner can be an issue as well, if they sell you on technology that is out-of-date, an old theme or even a platform that you can not access.

With over 44,000 themes for WordPress you need to take the time to look over the options, finding the right theme can save Time and Money, and reduce the pain of the next 10 years with less need to redevelop to stay on trend. If you are the Owner you will need 10-20 hours allocated to opening the theme’s and checking they have the right elements and plugin’s.

So NOW we have a theme, domain and we are talking to Hosting providers to get a good plan. £1.00 plans are basic and you need to be prepared to do all the work limited support. The Hosting people do not support your content issues, that only provide the space. For example you can rent a house, but the agent does not come and vacuum it every day !!!

Once you secure the location you need to start loading the content, images, text, decide on the layout, and learn more about the site CMS and how to drive this.

Also you need to know all about the plugin’s you require to make the features of the site work, they need to be updated weekly or at least monthly to avoid the issues with non-compatible elements you have in the version of WordPress and other plugin’s.

And by the way did we talk theme look and feel, the colours and styles, CSS and coding changes required to fit you logo and images.

Update: An owner will have spent over 100 hours (£800-£1000) at this point.

So you have the framework, some basic images, Are they royalty free or just taken from the internet… Be careful with this as it can get very expensive very quickly if you copied from who known’s where. I have heard that there are firms who just look for breaches of Royalty and Copyright to sue the user and it will cost. One US company was sued for over $80,000 by publishing an image of a US President.

At this point I would add that 99% of all sites don’t generate Client traffic, just SPAM … Lot’s of SPAM. These hits create a false measure of what your site was meant to achieve. You then need more plugin’s to deal with this issue, DDoS and Spam bot’s and more, and they always reserve the PRO version that really works, so you get the Free version and the problem get’s worse. Then with the PRO version it’s under control and you have another £8.00 subscription to go with the other £10.00 you pay for the Newsletter and Social Media tools.

Yes you can add another £20/month on those little gems.

Update: An owner will have now spent an additional £300/annum.

Please feel free to do all of the above, be an owner and undertake this project, it’s fun for the first 2-3 weeks. But if you get stuck and have invested over $3000.00 on your project, please call us and we will assist.

So next, we have a site with limited exposure, issues and still no real ROI (Return on Investment), as this was the real purpose. To have people find your Product and or Services. So how many converted leads ? How many calls ? How many e-mails?  …

If you said NONE, then join the over 90% who can say the same, because Google really only likes Sites with Video !!! What you didn’t add video.

Well most don’t as it slows down the site, and also the images you used are around 300K, to 3 Mb’s so they also have not been optimised, but wait for a small fee there is another plugin.

IF you have engaged a developer / graphic designer / website builder at this point , then congratulation for getting that you had better things to do, like make some money doing what you already do best… I do say this with a little “tongue  in cheek” humour.

Update: The right chose will have you get to this point in under 2 weeks with a budget around £500.00.

But there is still the Content writing and getting the message clear.

We can also agree that with a partnership you should have an expert with experience that has 50+ sites under the hood, any less and they have not developed the skills you will come to rely on.

For example; we have an recent client who come to us with a site to sell Auto-Parts, the person they engaged has been writing HTML (basic Code) for over 2 years, to develop a smart search engine feature, (that we sourced in 10 minutes at a cost of £12), he on the other hand had charged the client over £2,000.

If your still reading and not contacting us, then you are not currently an Owner or don’t have a project. Either way we have hundreds of similar stories from clients in over 40 countries and much worse. Last year a client advised us he was £104,000 in to a project to publish a website with a difference, it would provide a Training platform for people who want lessons in an instrument, and that talented musicians could register and host a class or 1-2-1 via the online platform.

We almost could not tell this client that for £200.00 there was a complete solution ready to go, that for less than £4000.00 we would what they have and more, adding a better Booking system, Marketing solution, Newsletter and much more…

When he heard this it was a emotional experience that had him give up at first, he abended the project. We also advised that there where over 8,000 similar sites operating around the world. His developer had convinced him to keep going as there was no one offering this on the internet.

And now we can talk about the on-going management, as this platform requires 2-3 hours of support every month. Not included in the Hosting, you have updates, back-up’s and issues to manage. The longer you put this off the more it will coast.

We see some clients do nothing until the site crashes, for so many reasons. They end up paying for the recover and related work. On average a £22/month charge can turn into a £500.00 recovery. If you look at that cost over 5-9 months usage, with minimal lead generation, the monthly average is usually £60-80 range and could have been avoided.

If you also have Blog content to be added then that is another £200/month of down-time and or lost revenue when you write your own material and re-blog on the 5-10 social media accounts.

UPDATE: So we can see the cost has now risen to a £5,000 /annum for an Owner with other expenditure over £500.00

And we can tell you more about the mistakes made, please call or chat to get more information.

SUMMARY:

Once all the cost’s are added up and looking at it over the next 10 years, you will pay an estimated £14,590.00 – £22,490.00 for your digital presence. A firm with a reasonable turnover between £3 – £10 million will spend £4,000/annum with a budget around £6,000. New forms of digital marketing which can’t be explained, can boost this to over £15,000.

If an Owner does his own site, 99% will never see any traffic and that means the 4-5 hours per week have cost them £200/wk, – lost earnings of £10,000/annum.

This hidden side to website ownership goes unaccounted with some devastating outcomes… Not to mention that after you learn all the skills you may decide to open your own Web/Digital business and drop the career you first started building the original site for, to find 10-20 clients and discover after 5 years your earning far less and dedicating over 45-55 hours unpaid to the project.

The Truth is clear when you go to Google maps and search on Graphic / Digital / Website / Hosting and discover over 50% of all local companies are from this industry, 90% have been around for less than 3 years and if you call they are no longer in business or no one answers the call, that there own site has not been updated in the last 12 months and Facebook and other Social media presence for them is not there or massively out of date.

So the most affordable option is to get a Experienced partner, with skills who understand your needs and can structure a plan to deliver a site that generates results. As I know many such people I can recommend someone who would do just that.