Recently we moved office and while the new office is fabulous, it hadn’t been used in a while and it needed a good clean.
We thought about doing it ourselves but we were just too busy. So we rang a contract cleaning company who we do the digital marketing for and asked them for a quote.
Now, I had figured there was about a day’s work to give the new office a good clean and get everything ship shape. On that basis I had a price in my head. When I got my quotation for cleaning it came in at over three times the price I had in my head.
Now my first initial reaction was no way, how can it cost that much to clean the office. I will do it myself or get one of the staff to do it.
Then I spoke to the cleaning company and they explained their quotation. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I quickly realised that the price was actually very good value for money. And why I hear you ask, did I suddenly change my mind?
They explained to me what actually needed to be done. In my ignorance as to what is involved to properly clean an office I had totally underestimated the amount of work involved.
The time needed to clean the windows (inside and out) was longer than the total time I had allocated to cleaning the whole office. This was before they actually cleaned the offices, boardroom, bathrooms & kitchen.
I quickly realised that it would actually take us 3 – 4 days to clean the office properly.
If I was to pay my staff to clean the office or do it myself, it would cost me an awful lot more than if we paid professionals to do it and what’s more it still would be an amateur job.
And then it struck me that some of our clients have the same reaction when they get a quote for a website. They too have totally underestimated the work involved to build a website properly. They (like I did with the cleaning) look at the job from an external point of view and think it’s only a few pages.
They don’t know that you have to
- Design the look and feel
- Install the database
- Configure the database
- Write the copy
- Select / create imagery for the site
- Build the pages
- Style the pages
- Do keyword research
- SEO every page
- Install Analytics
- Test everything
- Set up emails
- Configure the live server
- Put the site live
And that’s before you take into account dealing with all the customer interaction points along the way to get client approval, make changes, etc.
Your website is the centre of your Digital Marketing Strategy. Potential customers will form a first impression of your company based on the quality of your website. Even potential customers who may have heard about you in other ways apart from the internet will still look at your website and form an impression based on what they see. That is why it is essential to spend the time and the money to build a professional looking website that reflects your company’s marketing message properly.
So the next time you ask a website design agency for a quote for a website, just remember that websites are just like office cleaning. You get what you pay for. If you go with low price you cannot expect a professional service and an end result you will be happy with.
By the way, we got our office cleaned, and they did a fantastic job, the cleaning company was McCreery Cleaning and we can’t sing their praises highly enough.
