SkipG wrote:
aarondb4 wrote:
Really depends on your market and what you want out of the site. If your market is really competitive and saturated then it is going to be more costly to get your site up there in the search rankings and generating business for you. If your market is not saturated it is easier to get up toward the top of the rankings.
Then it depends on what you want from the site, do you want the site to generate business for you?
The market is pretty competitive here, and just starting out it will take a while to generate a solid referral base, so It would definitely be beneficial if I could generate some business from the site instead of just having the same stock broker supplied site that 95% of all other agents have. Basically a do nothing page that has a short about me message and contact info.
Spending $5k on a site is doable, would sting a little dropping the money at first but wouldn't take long to recoup that investment if it brought it a couple of clients. $10-$15k not sure that's a hefty investment.
I'll just give you an anecdote from Boise, ID. I used a local company (friend of mine) who does commercials, web development, graphic design, photography (including drone) etc. He started in real estate photog and went nuts from there. They did a brand design package including new logo for me for $1,500 with printing costs included.
This same company put together a bid for my wife's employer who is a criminal defense attorney and wants his site to make money for him. Their initial proposal was in the $5-6k range, eventually got it down to $3,500. That was for a simple attorney page. They build pages for realtors pretty often and from what I understand it is generally north of $10k as a realtors site is going to be quite a bit more robust than a lawyer.
I think the problem with going with someone in the $3k range is that you may get a site, but as far as SEO and rankings go you are likely to be disappointed. I can build you a really nice looking site using squarespace, it won't take me much work to put together and based on market I could charge you $3-5k to get it done. It would look really nice and you would probably really like it. But I don't know jack about SEO so your ranking likely wouldn't be very good (unless you buy adwords) and thus your ROI is not going to be there.
I still wouldn't spend $10k on a site so if I were you I might build my own with Squarespace (it really is easy), see how it goes, maybe invest in some adwords and go with that for a bit. If it is working, great, if it does nothing, you aren't out much and can always go the pro route later. Where people get pissed is when they hire an unethical me to build a nice looking site that doesn't perform, then they are out $3-5k for something they could have done themselves.