Getting the right advice

Over a month since my last blog post, not good enough!

Anyway, I was talking with a potential client last week and he was telling me that his bosses at the company were talking to another of their employees who had offered to re-do their website for them.

They’re a small farm park near Nottingham (a place we’ve visited on a few occasions with the boy Trem as it turns out) and the current website is pretty awful.  He (the employee) suggested that they needed a 50 page website to promote the park and that it would cost a few thousand pounds to put together and the guy I spoke to asked me if I thought they were being “ripped off” (his words).

Let’s take the second figure first.

It shouldn’t cost a few thousand pounds for a marketing website unless you’re going really heavy on the Flash animations or have some really big applications going on in the background.  There’ll be a few page designs to put together, making sure all the links work and that sort of thing but the biggest task would be putting together the content to fill those pages and the web designer doesn’t do that, the company does.

That’s not the big issue here obviously, 50 pages, 50 pages.  Alton Towers, UK’s biggest theme park has 200 pages on it’s site but they also have two hotels, a water park and a few million pound plus rides they want to advertise. People also expect Alton Towers to have a big website and will see it as part of the experience of going there.

The farm park in question is not Alton Towers.  I suggested they needed around 9 pages.  What they do, what’s at the park, a day in the life of the park (they have a great thing in the evening where all the animals go back to the barns and the kids can watch), children’s parties, school visits, getting there and opening time, contacting them and the home page,   More than enough information to get people interested and either go along or contact the park to find out more.  Cost, a few hundred rather than a few thousand pounds.

I’ve also spoken to companies who have paid large amounts to big design houses for a website, one company paid £10,000 for a website that was little more than a marketing site with a few videos (the videos were done by another company and cost extra).  They were told they were being charge £100 per hour so that means a total development time of 100 hours.  This was an 8 page website.  I asked them to contact the design company and put together how those 100 hours were spent because I couldn’t see where they’d spent their time.

I am more than happy to talk to any company that has received a quotation for there website and, under no obligation, will tell them if they are getting the right advice.  I will also look at any current website and let you know what I think could be done different in order to make the site work better for your company.