Affordable Website Design — Package Deal or Value Meal

I don’t know about you, but when I hear “pack­age deal” I hear vari­ety. When I hear about dif­fer­ent lev­els of pack­age deals, with incre­ment­ing costs, my default assump­tion is that each pack­age offers its own selec­tion of ever-improving options. Nat­u­rally, I also expect that the pack­age includes a greater amount of ben­e­fits obtained from pre­vi­ous packages.

But you know, I could be wrong. Maybe what most peo­ple call a pack­age deal I would call a value meal; the same selec­tion of items at a higher price, with cer­tain side ben­e­fits increased in quan­tity while the main part of the deal remains much the same. I can’t help but think there’s a ten­dency towards these sort of pack­ages after look­ing at a few sites that offered website design pack­ages where the main improve­ment seemed to be the num­ber of pages available.

Am I miss­ing some­thing here?

Myself, I’ve never under­stood the the­ory behind charg­ing by the page num­ber. Okay, sure, I under­stood it from a “hey, let’s grab the max­i­mum amount of money for the min­i­mum amount of work” stand­point, but it always struck me as a really rather arbi­trary method of pric­ing. Web­site designers have a tremen­dous vari­ety of tools that they can use to cre­ate a lay­out that func­tions across mul­ti­ple pages. CSS stylesheets, php file func­tions, dynamic data­base page cre­ation, exter­nal javascript files…

Maybe I am miss­ing some­thing. Maybe these web designers are using tem­plate sys­tems. That would make sense. The way those things lag, charg­ing by the page begins to sound down­right rea­son­able. I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea of a web designer actu­ally using a tem­plate sys­tem as their pri­mary method of design­ing websites. Or maybe they are expected to write all the con­tent? The cost per page for writ­ten con­tent would make sense. Myself, though, I’d rather write the con­tent for my busi­ness and let the web designer for­mat, opti­mize, and upload it.

It just seems to me that num­ber of pages isn’t a viable pric­ing method, and it is even less viable as a pri­mary scal­ing ben­e­fit of a web design pack­age. Com­plex­ity of cod­ing, con­tent cre­ation, data entry, e-commerce, SEO…all very valid things to base a pric­ing struc­ture on. Even hourly would make more sense if it wasn’t for the fact that there is no way to keep track of hours spent.

Get­ting back to my ear­lier anal­ogy, tak­ing your basic offer, adding more web pages, and call­ing it a pack­age deal seems to me like ask­ing the vis­i­tor to buy for the burger but pay by the french fry. You stick them all in the same vat of oil, toss on the same salt, put them all in the same car­ton, and it’s done. At least with food you get a more fill­ing meal. Huh, now there’s an anal­ogy for you. Addi­tional Web Pages: The #1 Filler Of Web­site Design Packages.

About Author: Dustin Schw­er­man is the head web designer for Truly Unique Web­site Design. Truly Unique works on web­sites of all vari­eties; their clients may offer prod­ucts and ser­vices rang­ing from Yucatan real estate to dou­ble wide mobile homes.

© 2009 — 2010, admin. Copy­right 2009. All rights reserved.

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Tags: affordable, Deal, Meal, Package, Value, Website Design

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.