Since our article “Singapore Website Design Price Guide – A Different Perspective” was first published in 2016, it has garnered high readership and many readers told us: “It was a good perspective to look at web design pricing. But really, what’s the real costs in terms of dollars and cents?” And so, we felt it’s time to shed more light on website design costs.
After browsing through the websites of web design agencies in Singapore, sending enquiries after enquiries, you probably know that the price range between different agencies can be quite wide.
Yes we know, it’s tough enough to differentiate the S$99 web design package from the S$5,000 ones, not to mention the five to six figures quotation.
So, what sets them apart to charge at different pricing?
Leaving the D-I-Y website building solutions aside (i.e Wix), a simple static website that is not more than 10 pages can be designed by students or fresh web designers for maybe S$1,000.
A web design agency, however, has access to a bigger team with broader and deeper skill sets. As such they can quote anything from S$5,000 to S$100,000 for a website project, depending on the man-hours required to develop it.
That being said, like everywhere else, the website design costs will vary according to your needs in Singapore.
Take into account things like:
- Site migration
- Integration with 3rd party applications like existing CRM, Point-Of-Sale Systems
- Custom programming
- E-commerce functionalities
- Product uploading for e-commerce inventory
- Copywriting/content creation
- Search engine optimization
- And more…
Invest in customised website design with a digital strategy.
The money that you’re investing goes into the following process:
Digital Strategy
Planning for a website strategy is a tedious process. It should be highly customised for your business and according to your industry’s needs. You’ll need experts to help you define your buyer’s persona in order to ensure your website is targeting the right people.
A digital strategy also includes a marketing objective and search engine optimisation techniques. You need to be mapping out systems to track each page’s performance on a regular basis to ensure their effectiveness is at maximum potential, enhancing what works and eliminating what doesn’t. Without a strategy, your website will fail you regardless of how attractive or slick it is in terms of how it looks.
Having a strategy is like having a foundation to build your web business upon. It helps you define your business goals and measure if it is being achieved. In a good website design process, a strong creative team will work with a digital marketing team and design choices are built around an outlined digital web strategy.
Design
After setting a website strategy in place, the website design should follow smoothly. Designers will create a website experience that is seamless and effective in ushering your prospective customers to committing to a sale. It should be intuitive and responsive in 2018, pre-empting questions that customers might have or want to know more about.
Your website should be designed in a way that is effective in getting you sales. With marketing heuristics, neuro-marketing for consumer decision making tactics in mind, the colour, font, layout and images of every page of your website should be left to the hands of an expert. Everything should be carefully considered; nothing is by fluke.
Development
How you build your website and how professionally it is done, really matters. Needless to say, the more flexible and scalable a website is, and the more extensive platform it is done on, works better. However, this is where the cost of website design differs too. You will need a higher budget for both the setup stage and on-going website maintenance.
Having worked with varied clients from a spectrum of industries, every client required different advanced features that suit them. Hence, these unique features should be custom coded into your website skillfully. You can either manage the hosting yourself or with a competent vendor who can consistently do checks and investigate solutions immediately if anything breaks.
We encourage coding a solution for individual clients from scratch, so each website is uniquely crafted around a customised strategy, working effectively altogether as a powerful sales and marketing platform.
In a nutshell, what is a bad website design that will lead you to pitfalls?
You might not be a digital expert, but you should know the key differences between a good and bad website to make the right pricing decisions. Do not be fooled or tricked into buying a less-than-adequate website design, only to be forking out more in the very near future, wasting a whole lot of precious sales and marketing time.
Hence, we urge you to look beneath the surface and be educated on the basics. Your goal should be to avoid a shoddy web design company or job at all costs.
A bad website (has):
- Disorganised web elements
- Poor page navigation
- Takes too long to load
- Inconsistent interface
- Unresponsive pages
- Poor usability
- Unclear marketing messages (copy is not user-focused)
The cost of a “cheap” website may seem like a great idea or a real-life saver at the start until after a whole fruitless year. Then you realise that it is failing to help you deliver customers. Many of our clients come to us complaining about the time and money they wasted having the need to get their site redesigned.
In summary of our website design cost guide, the question business owners should be asking themselves is – what does my business really need?
Being in the industry for more than a decade, we’ve met with countless business owners who are clueless about what their business demands or are obsessed with web features that really don’t matter at all when it comes to sales conversions.
A good web design strategy will ensure your website ranks on search engines, and your visitors navigate through each of your web pages effectively and persuadedly to reach an end-objective. However, “cheap” websites will guarantee that most of your web visitors never click beyond the home page.
You figure out how much sales potential is wasted. If you aren’t sure what your business site needs, it’s time to consult with us.
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