How Does a Pay-Monthly Website Solution Compare With the Alternatives?
Naturally, we’d like for you to come to the conclusion that a monthly website solution from Nice as Pi is the right choice for you, but we feel it’s only right to let you know what the competition has to offer, so that you can decide for yourself what’s best for your business.
Paid Up-Front, Project-Based Solutions
Paying up-front for a new website is the most common business model offered by website providers. Generally, the provider and the client meet, agree on a design and a price, and the website provider gets to work. Once the website is complete, the price is paid, and the website goes live. The provider will then charge a monthly or annual fee for hosting the website, along with the registration and renewal of the domain.
Up-front fees for building a website in this way, typically range between £2000 to £3000 for a responsive, well-designed website complete with content, images, video, and search engine optimisation. You can spend far more of course, but for a small business, this is the range you would usually expect to be talking about for such a website. The annual costs of hosting and domain renewal normally weigh-in at around £150-£200.
On top of that, website providers following this particular business model usually charge anywhere between £20 to £80 for each edit, update, or addition requested by the client. This means that even if you only request a single update each week, on average you’re going to rack up around £2600 worth of additional fees over the course of a year.
Total Cost Over Five Years
With the initial cost of the website build running somewhere between £2000 and £3000, we’ll average this at the mid-point of £2500. Then there’s the cost of hosting and domain renewal, priced at an average of £175 per year. On top of that, you’ll incur the cost of edits, updates and content additions, priced on average at around £50 per edit, update or content addition – or £2600 per year.
This brings us to a grand total of £5275 for year one, plus around £2775 for every year thereafter; although the more requests a client makes for edits, updates, and additions, the higher that annual cost is going to be.
Total cost over five years: £16,375
(Including one edit, update, or addition per week)
Self-Build Solutions
Building your own website is always the cheapest way to go, but the time investment in building and maintaining it is obviously much, much higher. Not only that, but if you’re not all that familiar with website development, you may find it tricky to obtain the result you’re looking for.
There are numerous “self-build” website providers out there, which can offer you the tools you’ll need to build your own website with relative ease. These providers often include domain registration and renewal, along with a range of website templates to choose from.
However, you’ll need to be proficient in at least basic html and css if you want to customise the look and layout of your website to fit your business, along with an understanding of how websites work, if you want to make significant alterations to the way your chosen template functions. Self-build solutions usually provide limited technical support if anything goes wrong behind the scenes, but you’ll also need to create and optimise all your own content, and if you get stuck – you’re on your own.
In our opinion, the best self-build website solution out there, is WordPress.com. WordPress.com offers its “Business” services at a monthly cost of £20 (as of March 2022). Many businesses also opt for the purchase of a “premium” website template, to give their website a responsive design, and make their online presence stand out from the crowd. Good, well-built themes generally market for a one-off cost between £200 to £300, for a lifetime licence.
There is another form of WordPress: WordPress.org. WordPress.org is not the same service as WordPress.com. Instead, it is a bare-bones content management system that many web developers favour (including ourselves), to manage websites that they themselves have designed and built from scratch. WordPress.org requires you to have you own server, a knowledge of working with databases, and an advanced level of experience in working with coding languages.
As of March 2022, WordPress.org powers almost half – 43% – of the entire internet. Some of the largest companies and organisations on the planet rely on it, including Ford, Sony, eBay, the BBC, MTV, and CNN, to name just a few.
Total Cost Over Five Years
(for WordPress.com)
As we’ve mentioned, self-build solutions are by far the cheapest way to get your business online; however, the task of building a fully-functional website, along with the constant, manual maintenance involved, often puts a lot of people off the idea.
With WordPress.com‘s monthly fee of £20 for its “Business” package, you’d be looking at an annual cost of £240, including domain renewal and hosting. On top of that, if you opt for a “Premium” website template, you’re looking at spending an average of another £250, although this is usually a one-time fee.
Total cost over five years: £1,450
(Although all website maintenance and content creation would be your own responsibility)
Pay-Monthly Solutions from Nice as Pi
That fee includes the build and maintenance of a beautiful, fully-responsive website design, search engine optimisation, hosting, domain registration and renewal, unlimited branded email addresses, online security, regular backups, in-house technical support, and a fully-managed content-creation solution, all based right here in London.
Whenever you need an edit, update, or addition made to your website, all you’ll need to do is call us, or send an email – and we offer not just one, but up to five edits, updates, or additions each and every month.
Total Cost Over Five Years
With everything included in one monthly fee, and with no up-front cost for the build, assessing the overall annual cost of a monthly website solution with Nice as Pi is extremely straightforward. Our monthly fee is £89 per month, giving us a grand total of £1068 per year.
It’s like employing a full-time webmaster for your business, on an annual salary of £1068 – around a third of the average monthly salary of an in-house web developer.
Total cost over five years: £5,340
(Including back-end maintenance, front-end redesigns, and up to five edits, updates, or additions each month)