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- Planning session
- Aligned to goals
- Scope and recommendations
How much does a website build cost?
This is a difficult question to answer without a bunch of background information. It depends on three fundamental questions:
- What outcome are you trying to achieve?
- Who are you targeting, and why?
- How does the ‘Who‘ become the ‘Outcome‘?
Each of these of course comes with a massive decision tree of questions and options to choose from depending on the answer.
What happens without a plan?
Any website designer, developer or builder should be taking you through a planning session before providing you a price to start a project. You might think that, because we’ve been doing this a while we can probably assume some things for you.
Would a financial planner assume how you want to retire before telling you how to go about it?
Those assumptions often lead to consequences that are all too familiar in web development land.
Scope creep and overrun: If we discover midway through a project that our assumption was wrong, why should you then pay for our mistake? We’ll have to ask you for more money and time, and you may not have that in your budget. Awkward! You will feel like you are being held to ransom and neither of us come out well.
Delays & Revisions: Have you ever heard of a project that took months longer than expected and was never able to be signed off? This often happens because your developer has done something you didn’t agree with but can’t quite explain why it’s wrong. You lose energy in the project because it’s too hard, the developer gets frustrated with waiting for you, and it all goes south.
Fails to meet needs: We’ve seen many websites fail to make a return on investment. Business is all about spending money to have a return far greater than the output. This happens because there is no plan or understanding of the goal.
The Digital Roadmap Journey
FREE
Discovery Call
A quick, 15 minute call where we’ll get to know you and see if we are a good fit.
Start NowWe’ll book you in for your Digital Roadmap session.
$2,479
Digital Roadmap Session
A collaborative deep dive through your business, your desired outcomes, your audience and what we have available.
Your custom digital roadmap plan and recommendations delivered within 7 days.
Project Execution
Accepting recommendations and creating a project!
Let’s get cracking, arrange all the blocks and put the plan into play.
Discovery Call
We start off with a quick 15 minute call to ask you a bunch of questions to see if we can help.
If we can’t then we’ll point you in the right direction.
If we can, then we’ll book you in for a Digital Roadmap Session.
The Digital Roadmap Session
In these sessions we focus on three things:
- All the moving parts and variables of this project – ie. who this project is for, why we’re doing it, what resources we have available, how it needs to be done, and when it needs to be delivered. Essentially, we’re going to ensure we have answers to all the big questions, and that everyone is on the same page.
- Define the success criteria for this project so we know exactly what it looks like when we’ve hit a home run.
- Create a plan to make sure we can achieve those success criteria in the given timeline.
Seven days after our session we’ll provide you with our recommendations about how you should go about your project with your end goal, budget and timeline in mind.
This will include where to spend your money to find your ideal customer for example SEO, AdWords, Social, radio ads, or a billboard on the highway.
Then we look at what we need to be driving those people towards, e.g. a website, and what that website will need such as a contact form, or a free giveaway, mailing list builder.
You may also need tools to support this such as a CRM behind it and automation, edm, social media planning tool and more.
Our recommendations will give you an idea about what it costs to knock this out the park.
Hopefully you’ll love it all and we’ll work together on this journey, but you can use the document to set your own path as well, choosing to do some of the work yourself, or go elsewhere.
Either way you will have a plan!
The Recommendations Session
Seven days after our session we’ll provide you with our recommendations about how you should go about your project with your end goal, budget and timeline in mind.
This will include where to spend your money to find your ideal customer for example SEO, AdWords, Social, radio ads, or a billboard on the highway.
Then we look at what we need to be driving those people towards, e.g. a website, and what that website will need such as a contact form, or a free giveaway, mailing list builder.
You may also need tools to support this such as a CRM behind it and automation, edm, social media planning tool and more.
Our recommendations will give you an idea about what it costs to knock this out the park.
Hopefully you’ll love it all and we’ll work together on this journey, but you can use the document to set your own path as well, choosing to do some of the work yourself, or go elsewhere.
Either way you will have a plan!
What's in a Digital Roadmap anyway?
With years of experience we can make some fairly good assumptions about these items for your next project, but it would be foolish of us to think we can know all this without going under the hood of the why you want a new website. Here is what we are thinking about when you ask us how much your website will be.
Business Goals
Most importantly we need to know how this will impact your business
Measurement of success
How will you measure this project to be a success?
Who is your client?
Who are your users, clients and decision-makers?
Ongoing Strategy
Post-launch requirements including content, SEO, and social media plans
Legislative and Compliance
What legal requirements, compliance standards, and data protection considerations
Wireframes
Wireframes, design mockups to visualise site functionality and layout
Competitors
Who are your competitors, and how do you stand out?
Tech stack
What is the best technology stack for this project
Website functionality
Your website functionality meets the user journey objectives
Platform preferences
Content management system (CMS) preferences.
External Integrations
Data sharing to CRM, e-commerce platforms, social media feeds etc
Marketing Integration
How does this project fit in with your other marketing efforts
Security
Security measures and protocols for implementation
Existing assets
Inventory & assessment of existing digital assets
Content
Content that needs to be edited or updated.
New assets
What is to be created (infographics, images, video) and who will do it
Content Strategy
Includes voice, tone, and messaging guidelines
Structure
Site structure, navigation, and user flow planning.
Design
Design that meets brand requirements and UX
Brand
Brand guidelines and visual identity – colours, fonts, logos
Accessibility
Accessibility standards and inclusivity requirements
User experience
User experience (UX) design considerations and principles
User interface
User interface (UI) design specifics for interaction
Administration
Front-end and back-end development requirements
Database
Database architecture and management
Performance
Performance optimisation and loading time targets
Google
SEO best practices and strategies for implementation
Quality & Testing
How we go about quality assurance and testing phases
Review
Feedback process and revision cycles
Hosting
Hosting requirements and deployment plans
Training
Training for team members on administration and management
Maintenance
Essential maintenance, support, and update strategy
Reporting
Post-launch analytics and performance monitoring
Timing
Project timeline, milestones, and delivery deadlines
Budget
Budget constraints and billing arrangements
Planning
Risk management and contingency planning
Book your Discovery call today
In this call we'll work out if we are a good fit for each other and set up a Digital Roadmap session, or we'll point you in the right direction for your circumstances today.
FAQ
A few of the common questions and as many answers as we could compile!
Yes it is.
Any successful business or project has a plan, and so much of that happens online, so we see this as essential.
However if you are constrained by budget (for example) as a startup, book a time for a quick chat and we’ll help point you in the right direction.
In our world, yes you must have a plan before you start building anything.
Just like an architect draws the plans for a new building. A formula one team uses data to decide what to change on the car to make it go faster, and the list you write before going to the supermarket so you don’t impulse but yet more Ferrero Rocher.
Not doing so is making a choice to roll the dice on your project, or stack the deck in your favour for success.
You should have your business leaders attend the Digital Roadmap Session.
Projects like this are pivotal to a business, and so your leadership team need to have a good understanding about why this is being done and how it will help the business.
Your leadership team often have the best answers to the questions that come up in the Digital Roadmap sessions as they have the experience and depth of knowledge from the history of the business, but also know where they are trying to take the business into the future.
Our recommendations are based on more than 20 years of experience, and we know what success looks like for our clients.
You can choose to us some, none or all of what we recommend.
Likewise you may choose to implement various aspects yourself, which is fine!
If you choose not to have us help you along this journey, that’s fine. Your Digital Roadmap is yours and you can use it to guide your own journey with other partners.
Very often in a Digital Roadmap session we’ll uncover things that make sense that are outside our wheelhouse.
For example we suggested a highway billboard to a client because his target market of tradespeople are always in a car of a truck driving on a particular route. We’ve never done a billboard, it’s not our experience!
We have a trusted network of suppliers for all of these roadmap items, and we will help you find the right people.
You nearly got us!
There are ways to build one page websites for just a few hours of work and $20 of platform fees.
But will it propel your business forward?
As you can see, not one size fits all and we can’t answer the price question until all the questions on this page have answers. You likely can’t do that because it’s not your area of expertise.
We’ve never had someone come to us with an answer to these questions, so the best way to ensure we put together a project for you that will knock it out of the park is to complete a Digital Roadmap with you.
You are the master of your field, not us.
So yes, you will need provide content for us to help move your project forward. This isn’t necessarily finished, polished content, but content that comes from your heart that we can repurpose and leverage in your project.
Imagery can be challenging. There are lot’s of icon libraries that can be used to enhance your text, and there are also vast stock image libraries. These are great when budget is an issue and you can’t engage a photographer to help you get your own shots.
Photographers are amazing at telling stories and we highly recommend you work with one to create some imagery for your business. Remember that you can also use these on social media, in brochures and other marketing – so it’s not a one off expense just for your website.
If you have imagery you wish to use, we’ll need it from you with sizing at least 2000px width or height. Anything smaller and it will look daggy and a bit crap on your site, especially on high resolution screens like phones and tablets.
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