By Marissa Freeman
Fingo has been in the fortunate position of helping hundreds of leading brands and businesses to design and develop new company websites. When our clients shop around, we notice that some agencies' website costs are typically higher than those of freelancers or development-only agencies.
This blog will help you to understand:
"A website is like a digital shop window". It's a saying we often hear, but in 2023, such a belief represents an outdated view of digital capabilities. The website must represent the most critical investment in your marketing portfolio. A well-designed website is nothing less than your most effective sales manager, your most talented marketing executive and your most empathic customer services rep.
A well-researched, well-considered, and well-budgeted digital website strategy is a central part of a business and commercial strategy. Consider how Amazon used its website strategy to grow from an online bookseller into the most formidable online e-commerce brand we have ever known: innovative User Experience, Conversion Rate Optimisation, and ambitious technical web infrastructure were behind the brand's success.
Websites that are High-Performing are proactively seeking out new audiences, winning trust, converting sales and gaining a competitive share of your market.
We meet well-established brands and enterprises all the time who are yet to catch up with understanding the power of good technical digital advancement. We only wish we'd been able to work with Toys R Us, Blockbusters and Woolworths before it was too late. We believe that in a changing world of AI and younger customers, brands should not accept dormant, decorative sites.
Fingo approaches website projects differently from freelancers and development-only agencies. As an integrated, full-service agency, we pull in all the experience and skills from our cross-service teams to maximise the potential of your website. Typically, the main difference is ultimately down to the consultative approach and multi-skilled team you would have contributing to the website. When we look at our raw development costs alone, Fingo generally aligns with other dev-only website creators.
1. We are your digital strategy partner, not just a web agency.
Our highly consultative approach means we start with your business objective. Before diving in on any website design or improvement project, we seek to answer a simple question: what problem are we solving? We use KPIs to measure the aims, progress and success of your website project and build our design around these goals. Will your vision work to achieve this? If we don't think your ideas will aim to earn your business goals, we'll let you know and recommend something else. Our key strategists from each service will meet and combine their ideas, aiming to achieve a shared common goal - your success.
2. We integrate SEO as a core part of the design and build.
At Fingo, our approach to website projects is so inclusive of SEO that we begin design work only once a full keyword analysis and content audit is undertaken. SEO and development teams work holistically as part of the wireframe process in consultation with the design team, ensuring blocks of copy required for Search strategies are reflected in the early design prototypes.
We go a step further, and we require both Design and Dev teams to sign off wireframes to ensure the elements will be read favourably by Google's bots. Because if your pages load quickly, your site works well on mobile devices, and you've optimised your user journeys, you'll be rewarded with better search rankings.
3. We design empathic User Experiences primed for conversion at every opportunity.
We use analytics and customer journey mapping to identify the business-critical pages essential to the conversion process. We then apply the enhancements we discussed earlier to make these pages lightning-fast and easy to navigate. It isn't just the entry page that matters. We aim to provide the smoothest possible flow from product listings to product details and checkout, for example. Your site users will also be happy because they are having an effortless experience. Ponderous and frustrating experiences aren't what Google wants to serve up to its customers. They aren't what your potential customers want either.
4. We build solid Infrastructures.
Infrastructure is essential if you want maximum performance. Here are some of the basics that we focus on:
● Fast and reliable servers.
● An up-to-date CMS, ideally with CDN capabilities.
● Efficient coding practices at the front and back ends.
We use a mobile-first approach to design and ensure that the core of your site is built around the needs of mobile users. We make the mobile experience as fast and polished as possible.
Most site visits come from mobile devices, and Google employs a mobile-first approach to page rankings.
We'll also ensure your pages are structured correctly and use the right keywords in the right places. They'll also ensure that technical features such as schema markup, robots.txt files and sitemaps are executed perfectly. Many web designers and developers see SEO as 'somebody else’s problem.'
5. We have a proven track record.
We typically design, develop and launch a dozen new websites annually - all in-house, all high-performance. Below are a couple of recent website projects that we are very proud of.
Lagoon Pools is an excellent example of our beautiful User Experience design. Lagoon Pools were burdened with a slow and hard-to-navigate website, causing a significant bounce rate. We dedicated our efforts to a new web build- revamping the brand look and feel, optimising page speed, SEO and streamlining the user journey. Our post-launch SEO and Armour package has ensured fast loading times, an increase in search engine rankings and an influx of organic enquiries.
Mitsui approached us with a website they felt was dull and difficult to use, aimed solely at a legislative audience. Our website development work with Mitsui focused on technical infrastructure and interest. We designed a website that injected intrigue into the subject matter and made the site easy to follow. Post-launch, our Armour and Development support packages have ensured a safe, secure and evolving website that has grown with the business.
Our approach to all web builds uses a methodology called Growth Driven Design (GDD), enabling the client or their chosen brand/performance agency to create landing/campaign pages through the block builder.
When thinking about your website budget, there is a longer-term budget efficiency that needs to be factored in. Fingo develops your site in a way that means we would only need to be involved if you wanted to add new functions or block designs.
Many developers sneak in a 'dependency' factor, which means you are dependent on them for each change or edit entry, resulting in spiralling costs -every time you need something, you can likely expect a developer to charge £3-5k each time, depending on what's required - it won't take many campaigns before the cost is already in their favour. Campaigns become too expensive to run, eating into the entire marketing budget.
The cost of developing a site built to convert sales and generate leads justifies ROI. When large media campaigns, re-branding initiatives, collateral production and video production budgets are taken into consideration, the website needs to be given equal prominence as it is always the medium reported on, as we see in the audit work undertaken.
While we can explore a much more stripped-back website design, in our opinion, it would be better to try and position this as a major piece of digital infrastructure, paving the way for your brand to be a serious player in a highly competitive marketplace. It's not uncommon for our clients to come to us with a budget of £20k and ultimately invest £50-£80k once they understand they would have seen a return on their investment within 12-24 months.
The cost of skimping on your website and website digital strategies is that your competitors likely aren't. A Google algorithm upgrade or an AI advancement will quickly place pressure on how your website is expected to serve your customers and interact with search engines to stay on top. Investing a low-moderate budget in a website that doesn't perform could be a devastating blow to your business.
Get in touch today at marketing@fingo.co.uk to upgrade your website and help it perform at the next level.