When a business first gets in touch, one of the early questions is often whether we have packages. It's a fair thing to ask. Most people have bought a website before, and the last studio may well have handed over three tiers with a price beside each and let them pick (the middle one, nearly always). Our proposals start somewhere else, with a conversation about what the site needs to earn for the business, and the plan gets built to the budget you're working with.
Why tiers misprice most businesses
A tier sheet is quick to quote and easy to sell, and it keeps the first call short, all of which helps the studio far more than the business paying for the site. Take an eight-person consultancy that wins most of its work through referrals. Its site has to hold up when a prospect goes looking after an introduction. A sixty-person firm pitching for government tenders needs its site to do a fair amount of pre-qualification before anyone picks up the phone. Put both on the same tier and one overpays for features it will never use, while the other finds out halfway through the build that the tier never covered what it needed.
Starting from commercial goals
So the first conversation is about commercial goals. Over the next two or three years, what does the site need to do: bring in enquiries, take pressure off a stretched sales team, carry online revenue or justify a price that sits above the rest of the category? The answer decides where the budget goes first, and it shapes the build far more than page count does.
What the budget changes
From there, the budget sets the shape of the plan. At $15,000 (all our figures are ex GST) we'd build a smaller site that does one or two jobs properly, with the CMS set up so a case study library or a careers section can be added later without rebuilding anything. At $60,000 there's room for more page templates, a longer strategy phase at the front and more integration work for us to scope and manage. Both sites get built to the same standard (we only work to one), and the budget decides how much of the plan arrives at launch and how much is sequenced for later. If a budget is too tight for the site a business needs, we'll say that before anything is signed.
What a proposal looks like
What comes back to you is a proposal built around your business: the strategy and positioning we've worked out, an itemised scope, a fixed price and our ongoing support rates for after launch. Larger or less defined projects, multi-phase commerce builds especially, get a rate guide with ranges for each stage instead of a single number. Putting a fixed figure on work that hasn't been scoped yet would only move the risk onto you. There's more on how fixed pricing works once scope is agreed if you want the mechanics.
Heritage Saunas, built around one goal
Heritage Saunas is the clearest example I have of a site planned around a single commercial goal. The brief was to win enquiries from architects and high-end homeowners before a single sauna had been built, and every part of the site was planned around reaching that audience. Within three months of launch, with no paid advertising, it was bringing in two to three qualified leads a week, and it converts enquiries at 4.6% against a 2.7% industry benchmark.
