When speaking to new clients, we ask them what they’d like their website to do. We’ll brainstorm with them and come up with their ultimate wish list. Only when this is done, do we speak about costs.
The importance of discussing a new website in this way is that it allows you to think freely about what features you’d like to have and how those features can best reach the goals for your website without limiting your mind to what is affordable. Sometimes, what might seem unaffordable, isn’t the case at all (especially with WordPress) and so leaving that idea out could mean that it never gets developed. It amazes us that some clients never mention ‘feature X’ because they have already decided it’s unaffordable without discussing with us first. Even if the entire wish list isn’t catered for immediately in the website’s launch, a roadmap for development is in place, ready to implement as part of your ongoing website development.
One of the wonderful things about WordPress is the enormous community that surrounds it. New plugins are being developed and released everyday and it’s these plugins that might be able to add ‘feature X’ to your site with little or no up front cost – many WordPress plugins are free but the more advanced ones can usually be picked up for less than $50. Depending on the plugin, adding this to the site can take as little as 15 minutes – that’s hardly an outlay for either client or developer.
Of the top 18 plugins listed at wordpress.org, ten of them would take us less than 30 minutes to add, seven would take between between 30 minutes and 1 hour 30 minutes and one (WooCommerce) would take 4 hours or more. This list includes contact forms, an advanced gallery, analytics, site optimisation and a fully featured eCommerce plugin.
Hopefully, this post has provided you with some insight about how cost effective it can be to develop your WordPress website, hiring a developer to add plugins and style them to fit your website and branding appropriately. Of course, if greater functionality is needed which doesn’t currently exist as a plugin, then we can develop one for you.
If you’d like to speak to us about developing your WordPress website then get in touch!