This means that they will pay 75% up to a maximum of $5000 for the costs of development of a website for northern Ontario based businesses and organizations within the NEOnet catchment area.

In addition to the increased funding amount, it is now required that 3 quotes from web development and design companies in our catchment area be submitted with the application (up from the previous 2 required quotes).

The final modification of the program is the refusal of applications indicating work has already been completed.

Complete BEAM program information and application can be found on the NEOnet BEAM Program web page.

If you’re interested in what we can do for your business, contact us today!

We’re a Timmins, Ontario based web design and development team focused on providing effective and engaging websites for businesses and organizations in Northern Ontario and beyond. We look beyond the first impression, to keep your customers coming back.

Andy presenting E-Commerce Security at a NEOnet E-Business Luncheon. Photo by Olivier Charbonneau, L'Express de Timmins

Way back in October Andy presented on E-Commerce Security as part of NEOnet’s E-Business Seminars for the BEAM program.

We discussed the importance of ensuring the proper methods are taken to protect any sensitive information being collected, stored and retrieved from your websites.

Download the presentation.

See the article La sécurité omniprésente du Web at L’express de Timmins. (In French)

The program provides a rebate for 75% of eligible costs, up to a maximum of $2,000.  Perfect if you’ve been thinking abouta  new website for your business but felt that cost was an inhibiting factor.

This is really great news if you’ve been looking to add things like online stores, social media and any other features to your website that enhances its ability to conduct your business/operations online.  It also applies to new websites that incorporate these features.

YUZHU specializes in e-commerce, content management systems, online catalogs, social media strategies and other web-enabled functionality to improve businesses online.

For full details on the BEAM program, contact NEOnet at 705-360-1353 or email ahamilton@neonet.on.ca.

If you’ve been holding off on that website or those extra features because of cost or lack of knowledge, now is the perfect opportunity to have financial assistance and educational opportunities to take your business to the next level.

Contact us today for a free consultation and we’ll show you the YUZHU difference.

Our goal is to provide a bit of information to those seeking web design services so they understand what drives the cost of a website.

A Very Brief Flashback

I’ve been involved with web site design since 1995.  I created my first web page as part of an assignment for an Internet course I was taking.  It was a website about fishing, called Andy’s Fish Hut.  I didn’t get rich off of it.  I got an A-.

At this time websites were popping up all over the place and they were all basic HTML websites.  Pages devoted to providing information about the companies, their services and products.  That’s it. You could not buy online.  No user reviews, pop-up photo galleries, chat boxes, or any of the features we find on the most basic online stores today.  Remember, we were dialing-up on 28.8, 33.6 and for the rich, 56K modems at this time.

Companies were paying HUGE bucks for websites.  Why?  Because it was the future of the Internet and not too many people out there knew HTML.  I’m talking $10,000 – $15,000 for 10 to 15 pages of static information!  Who reads 10-15 pages from a business website today anyways?

As web technology developed and the marketplace began to saturate with web designers and developers, the costs started dropping.  By 2000-2004, the same websites in 1995 could be had for $2,500 to $5,000.   Today the pricing isn’t that far off ranging from $1,200 to $4,000 for the same type of site.

Today…

A lot of things have changed. Not just technologically but legalities, regulations, and policies also affect the costs of web design. Things like copyrights, privacy protection, data encryption, process compliance and so on.

Websites of the past were nowhere near the complexity of today’s most popular websites in e-commerce, news, entertainment, blogs, social networks and so on. They may seem simple to use in front of your computer, but behind those fancy graphics are complex codes, development processes, project management, legal teams, marketing, infrastructure, and big budgets.  Really big budgets.

What does this mean to the small to medium sized business like yours?

You can take advantage of the same technologies on a smaller scale and at a much lower cost.  Your costs will be directly related to the technologies you use and the skill of the designer and developers you choose.

There isn’t a magical formula that is used to calculate a cost, even in today’s marketplace of web designers ranging from beginner freelancers to large corporate sized firms.

Don’t be shocked, but you can have a website site for FREE all the way up to millions of dollars.  A personal blog site can be had for FREE but a website such as an airline will easily fetch 7 figures or more, not including the ongoing costs to keep a monster like that operating.

Important factors that affect website pricing include:

• Online business needs
• Size of your business
• Website features
• Web hosting, maintenance and support services
• Aesthetic qualities and features
• Graphic requirements such as stock photos or custom designs
• Internet marketing services
• Advanced development requirements
• The design firm, agency or freelancer developing the website
• Billing rates: per page, per hour, per project

Based on our experience and the markets we have work in, we can provide a rough guide to some web design and development pricing we have seen and have provided ourselves.

FREE… YAY!

We all love free things, don’t we.  In the case of free websites you’re typically signing up with a company that is providing a limited amount of service.  They provide easy tools to design your website, but they usually provide you a choice of template, color combination and ability to upload a logo.  You may not be able to use your own domain name (eg. www.mybusinessname.com).  It will likely be a subdomain or a folder (eg. mybusinessname.free-websites.com or www.free-websites.com/mybusinessname).  Not too professional for emails and business cards.

An indirect cost to you is that they will have their logo somewhere on your website too, and they might even have sponsor ads on your website.  Not very professional for a business to have other people’s advertisements on their website!

Pros & Cons

Pros
FREE!
User friendly tools to design and update your website yourself
FREE!

Cons
May not be able to have a custom domain name
Sponsor advertisements on your website
Limited space  and functionalities… you won’t be selling on your FREE website
Often these are slow loading sites

Budget Friendly $400 to $1500

A typical small business website consisting of 4 to 10 pages can range from $400 to $3000 or a bit more depending on the designer and aesthetic requirements.  These are typically brochure type websites which provide customers important information about your business and the products you sell.  The most advanced function of the website may be a contact form.  They generally do not provide any interactivity with visitors.  Maintenance is performed by the designing company with predetermined maintenance contracts, schedules and fees.  You can relate this type of site to the first round of HTML pages from 1995.

Pros:
Low initial cost as pricing is typically a package or per-page rate
Ideal for the business or organization requiring minimal updates
Quick turnaround times
Great way to get online economically

Cons:
Minimal to no elements of interactivity with customers or visitors
Requires webmaster skills (or services) to modify the website
As frequency of updates increase, it may exceed the terms in maintenance and update contracts and updates begin to get costly

In Part 2 I’ll talk about custom developed sites, online stores, content management, and multi-media websites and the factors that drive the costs of those types of websites.

Social media is a product of how we use the Internet. It’s the behaviour of the web user that makes it so popular and revolutionary. Here is a short video on the Social Media Revolution. It’ll get you thinking about it more seriously. It’s not a matter of if you should use it, but how you can use it.

But are they a good idea considering today’s demand for quick information and short attention spans?

Splash pages can be beneficial in some cases.  For example:

• Announcing important website-related news, disclaimers, warnings, site requirements and/or language selection
•  Used for trailers or teasers for things like movies and product advertisement
• Enticing visitors to provide information before proceeding
• Showcase creativity in the case of professions such as photography, graphic design and animation
• Age verification for adult oriented content

We feel that splash pages should be avoided if possible.  They are remnants of the early days of the web. We have maybe 1 or 2 websites that we have developed (unwillingly!) with splash pages.  Those typically are requirement to present a language choice (eg. French or English website).  There are many reasons why splash pages should be avoided.  We’ll share a couple:

Search Engine Obliteration

Splash pages can be a real search engine optimization (SEO) killer. Splash pages are void of any valid content, if any, since they are typically some sort of graphic or animation. Maybe the useless words “Enter” and/or “Exit” may appear. The lack of text, or keywords, on this first page of your website really hurts your search engine rankings.  Don’t think that cheating with meta keywords will help.  Google doesn’t even look at those anymore.

Links are also important in your search engine rankings.  The splash page only has one link, and that’s to your home page.  It is very unlikely that somebody will link back to your splash page when sharing a link.

Many splash pages will redirect a user to the home page after the animation has ended, or after a certain amount of time.  Quality search engines like Google try to deliver users directly to the information they are seeking.  When these search engines see that your base URL (eg. ww.yoursite.com) is redirecting to another page, your ranking will be negatively affected.

Forsaking quality, relevant content on the most important page of your website for a flashy “Enter” page is really hard to justify.

User Frustration

Usability is paramount in web design.  Visitors arrive at your site expecting to enter it, and the splash page is like a road block. Splash pages that contain high quality graphics or animation takes time to load.  In the case of animations, after the loading time, there’s also the playing time.  You better make that “Skip intro” link highly visible. The majority of your website visitors, especially returning visitors, will not wait for your presentation to finish.  They will find another website.  And since you are putting that link there, what are you saying, really? “This page isn’t that important, so you can skip it and get to the actual website”. Why bother?  You’re wasting the visitor’s time.

Users on slower internet connections will suffer.  It’s hard to believe that even today, there are people still on dial-up.  Let’s not forget our mobile device users.  Flash animation is a nightmare for those who do not have Flash installed or use an… iPhone or iPad.  They will get a blank screen telling them they need the Flash players.  But guess, what, Flash player is not available for those devices (yet).  Wow, that’s frustrating!

Here’s what Newfangled Web Developers wrote about their own splash page:

The number one reason for getting rid of our splash page was that it turned away at least 25% of our site visitors, sometimes more. This percentage is has actually been researched and it turns out that at least 25% of site visitors will immediately leave a site as soon as they see a “loading” message for a Flash splash screen (even if there’s a “skip intro” link). Our access logs confirmed this for us and this over all the other reasons caused us to get rid of it. The opportunity to “prove our creativity” was not worth the loss of such a high percentage of visitors.

Read the full Splash is Dead article.

Web users, like yourself, are busy.  They want their web searches to be quick and accurate.  Search engines are not perfect, so anything you can do to help users find what they are looking for on your websites will only help achieve your website goals.

Despite our dislike for splash pages we still think it is important for our clients to understand the pro and cons of splash pages.   It is dependent on how the website is used to achieve the organization’s goals.  We feel with the proper information, the right decision can be made.