Since our last post there have been several changes to our business.
For several reasons, we have decided to change our website pricing from a one-time charge to a monthly charge. First of all, most of the websites we have created so far are for business owners who have no experience or desire to maintain it after we turn it over to them. Most business owners we have spoken with would prefer to have somebody else do all the work and worry about updates, renewals, etc. rather than them. We decided that $49 per month with a minimum one-year contract would be fair. It takes 20 to 30 hours (or more!) to produce a good-quality website and when you add the cost of hosting and domain name, we’re not even making a profit until the 2nd year. But we have enough confidence that our customers will love their site and want to keep it, we’re willing to take the risk.
So, the monthly fee, in addition to covering our upfront cost of creating and posting the site, will cover all renewals, unlimited pages and updates (within reason!), ongoing spam filtering (for comments, contact forms, email, etc.), file backups, firewall security, updates to WordPress, themes and plugins that control the function of your site, and anything else that would fall under the category of ‘routine maintenance’. Depending on your level of activity, we could easily spend several hours on any given month to keep your site in top shape.