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We have created an entirely different pricing model to those of other website development companies that reflects the true costs of building a website, but which can be confusing when being compared with other solutions.
This will help to explain where our pricing model has come from and why it will save you thousands of dollars both in setting up your website and in future costs associated with both hosting your website and upgrading and maintaining it.
The history of website development pricing
The internet was first created by academics to enable them to quickly and easily publish their latest findings without the traditional print and distribution related publishing costs.
Since there were no simply ways to create web pages, individuals and companies set themselves up as web developers. However, because they had no existing pricing model to work from, they created one based on traditional print publishing methods - where a web page is equivalent to a single printed article or story and a website is equivalent to a complete book or magazine.
This effectively turned what was a low-cost fluid medium into one that was comparable with printed media - pages set in concrete, just like printed pages, and costs comparable to those of creating a printed brochure or book.
Today's pricing models
This same pricing model still exists today and is what is used by almost all web development companies. It looks like this:
1 Web Page: $50 - $500 depending on the amount of work involved plus a base charge of anywhere from $250-$1,000,000 for the underlying website, functionality and the technology to run it on.
Creative Look/Website Design: $250-$20,000 depending on the complexity of the design and the client's budget - i.e. the more money the client has or perceives they have to pay for 'quality', the more we can charge.
You will see companies at the low end charging typically around $150-$1500 to setup a template (existing) design website with a small number of pages for you (e.g. 3-10 pages). If you want a custom designed template (the graphical look and feel of the site) for your company's website, they will charge between $450-$2500 for the same few pages.
For 'custom built solutions', which is what a typical web developer does, you will find pricing ranging from $1500-$10,000 for the same solution - but the creative design should be stronger. However, the website will take months longer to be developed, especially when you take the 'scoping' procedure into account (scoping is where the web developer spends time, and in some cases your money, figuring out what you need and how much they can charge for that).
Functionality, Content Management, e-Commerce, etc
As soon as you want any sort of editing control over your website's content, e-commerce functionality (i.e. being able to sell stuff online) or any other sort of specific programmed functionality then your website development cost will sky rocket - regardless of what traditional web development company you are dealing with: small or large, low-cost or high-cost.
They see your need as a way of extracting more money from you, because now you obviously need a 'serious' website that you intend to make money from, and also a way of justifying their skills and therefore their exorbitant hourly rate.
What makes Woogloo different
When we first began developing websites we quickly realized that 'reinventing the wheel' each time we built a new site was expensive and time consuming for both ourselves and our clients. While we could reuse bits of code we had developed for other clients, the real costs remained high and if we had continued on with that approach we would have gone the way of most small or even large web developers and eventually gone out of business.
We identified that all websites have the same basic elements: the overall site creative design, content on pages and a menu structure for navigating around the site. Added to this, all clients have the same basic requirements for gathering visitor information and recording their activity on the site (Client Registration and Site Activity Reporting), securing access to certain pages or pricing (Site Security), promoting or selling things online (e-Commerce) and editing the content of the pages (Content Management System - CMS).
We then set about to develop a website that had all of these elements and features that could be quickly and easily customized to suit a specific client's needs - both from a creative design and functionality perspective. That is, we wanted a product that would not limit either the web designer's creativity or the site's functionality so that it could be quickly and easily adapted to suit a client's very specific needs.
The genesis of a new pricing model
We ended up developing a very powerful website design and development tool. Our contemporaries in the marketplace told us that we should be pricing it alongside other similarly powerful products - i.e. $50,000 - $150,000 per license, plus set-up and maintenance charges.
We found that this pricing model meant that each sale would takes months of hard work and a large support team to enable us to service large and demanding clients.
We brought the price down to only $4500 per license, plus set-up and maintenance charges, in an attempt to increase sales. While we did achieve and increase in sales, the overheads associated with those sales were still way too high.
We then began giving away the software and charging a small license fee per month as part of the hosting cost. But everybody began thinking that free equaled no value.
We finally discovered that while we can still give the software away for free and charge a small license fee as part of the hosting fee, we can concentrate on charging and pricing new websites based on the things that really cost us: creative design and extra functionality. This enabled us to build a new type of pricing model that has very low to no fixed overheads and large numbers of profitable sales.
New pricing model to save you money
Because Woogloo is so very powerful, you have almost unlimited control over all aspects of your website: it's creative design, the page content, site security, site functionality and even the number of pages and products you have on your website. The real trick was to create a system that even an Internet 'newbie' could use with little to no training.
Once we had achieved this, we could eliminate any page related costs. This in effect turned the Internet from being a fixed, high-cost medium back into the fully fluid, low-cost solution it was intended to be.
Packaged solutions
Most of our clients simply want a website setup for them that looks great. We have recognized this by creating a package that enables us to create a top level creative design for your company and apply this design to Woogloo, to setup up to ten pages with content you supply and to give you the training and tools to be able to manage this site and to build on it to almost any level.
This package we call the e-Brochure option and costs only $995 + GST.
We have a number of other solutions, including a DIY option ($99 + GST) for those people who want to simply use one of our existing template designs and to build their own site. It still has all the powerful features of Woogloo, as this functionality comes free-of-charge anyway.
Traditional hosting costs
One of the other charges rarely considered by companies when they are commissioning the development of a website is the ongoing hosting costs. Many web developers simply cannot host a website and disassociate themselves from these costs so as not to 'muddy the water' when quoting for the site development.
Hosting is charged for because your website needs to be setup on a server (powerful computer) that is always connected to the Internet via a high-speed Internet connection. There are various 'standard' hosting charges used by traditional web developers and ISPs (Internet Service providers).
HTML website hosting (No CMS, Security, Client Registration, e-Commerce, etc. functionality): $14.95-$34.95+ per month
Access Database hosting (Can have high end functionality but the database self corrupts and the site can only handle very low traffic levels): $50-$120+ per month
SQL Server hosting (Industrial strength database (can handle hundreds of thousands of visits per minute) and very high-end functionality website): $60-$250+ per month
Lower hosting costs
A major part of the Woogloo development has been in maximizing the speed of the website and ensuring that the entire website takes up a fraction of the server's hard disk space in comparison with traditional website technology. This has enabled us to bring down the cost of hosting.
Our base hosting fee of $24.95 per month gives you not just Woogloo, but full SQL Server hosting and five free email accounts.
This makes Woogloo hosting fee equivalent with that of ordinary HTML website hosting charges. This is possibly one of the most revolutionary aspects of an Woogloo website.
Summary
Traditional web developers have captured the website development market and locked their clients into solutions they have little to no control over - for proof just ask your web developer if he will give you control over the look of your website and watch his/her reaction!
Along with this control and 'black box' mentality comes pricing pegged to traditional printed media. That is, a per page charge along with a 'price plus, plus' philosophy.
The power of Woogloo is recognized in greater control for the client which means lower costs up front and a more efficient storage system therefore lower ongoing costs.
Overall Woogloo has turned the Internet from being a fixed, high-cost medium back into the fully fluid, low-cost solution it was intended to be.
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