I'm putting together a business proposal to be reviewed by a bank soon, and I need to get the general pricing for a website. I see some like godaddy.com listed for $10. I see other options on other sites. I like the way the flash sites looks, as they seem clean, and not an eyesore.

I'm looking for something like:

Oklahoma Wedding Videographer Video Videography | Prime Visual Media (http://www.primevisual.com/wedding/)
Travis' site: DreamBIG Productions - A Different Kind of Wedding Film (http://www.dreambigweddings.com/index2.php?v=v1)
or Ryan's: RHM Photography Wedding Photographer (http://www.rhmphotography.com/)

What is the start up cost on these, and how much is it every month after that? I don't know if this info is too personal, but with all of the website hosting sites out there, there's nothing that gets answered (as to specs I need), FULL start up costs, etc. Hopefully it's discussable. Thank you all so much for your help.

There are an unlimited number of ways and costs associated with a website, from fully custom designs and hosting to templates. I think there are some great solutions for people with little programming or design knowlege using flash templates. You can spend a lot more than this for a custom website, but I think these kinds of places do a great job at the lower end of the cost spectrum. The following are aimed at photographers, but can also be used for video. Cost ranges from about $200-$600 for the initial template and hosting usually runs from $100-$200 per year. Take a look:

http://www.bludomain.com
BIG Folio (http://bigfolio.com)
Websites for Photographers (http://photoidentities.com)
Websites for Photographers. Editable and Customizable Designs | Creative Motion Design (http://www.creativemotiondesign.com)
Websites for Photographers by iCreations. Photography websites for wedding photographers, portrait photographers and commercial photographers. (http://www.icreations.com/)

I'll add to that; Build a website with MooreCast website builder (http://www.moorecast.com)
Wes Moore give the best customer service I've ever had and while initally his stuff may look expensive, it's only expensive if it doesn't work and his stuff works. Not only can you try it out for free but call him and talk to hime about what he's got.
BTW, lots of flash stuff is there.

Don

I've been really happy with Livebooks:
liveBooks - professional (http://www.livebooks.com/packages/professional/index.php)

I think their sites are generally geared toward photography portfolios, but they customized my site with a video page:

Contemporary Wedding Videography - Moving Sky Wedding Cinema (http://www.movingskycinema.com)

I'm putting together a business proposal to be reviewed by a bank soon...

I'm confused by your post. Are you planning to do business with the bank to offer web services to them? If so, why would you use wedding videographer sites for examples?

Or, are you trying to get a loan? If your aim is to get a loan, do you really NEED it? How will it really benefit you and your business. With a loan, you are creating overhead. You'll have to make the payment whether you get customers or not.

There sure are some fancy-schmancy web sites being designed these days. But unless you are the designer of web sites, I don't see how having a fancy site really would generate any more business for you as a videographer than a less fancy site.

Jeff

Or, are you trying to get a loan? If your aim is to get a loan, do you really NEED it? How will it really benefit you and your business. With a loan, you are creating overhead. You'll have to make the payment whether you get customers or not.

Good points. I would leave the fancy flash sites with startup costs over $200 until after you have a bit more established biz.... but that is my personal taste. some people like to hit the ground with a fully flashy startup look.

I'm confused by your post. Are you planning to do business with the bank to offer web services to them? If so, why would you use wedding videographer sites for examples?

Or, are you trying to get a loan? If your aim is to get a loan, do you really NEED it? How will it really benefit you and your business. With a loan, you are creating overhead. You'll have to make the payment whether you get customers or not.

There sure are some fancy-schmancy web sites being designed these days. But unless you are the designer of web sites, I don't see how having a fancy site really would generate any more business for you as a videographer than a less fancy site.

Jeff

Yeah, I'm trying to get a loan. I'm just trying to get a ballpark amount. I didn't know if $500 as an estimate was unreasonable, or if they cost $4000. I just have no clue. I haven't had a website since my free tripod site. Yeah, tripod.com. It's been that long ago. And that one was FREE!

As a customer, I check out sites. If it's cluttered an non-navigable, I'll leave. I put false hope into well built sites. i know there must be more like me.

What would the price difference be monthly from a mediocre site to that of a "fancy-schmancy" one?

Yeah, I'm trying to get a loan. I'm just trying to get a ballpark amount. I didn't know if $500 as an estimate was unreasonable, or if they cost $4000. I just have no clue. I haven't had a website since my free tripod site. Yeah, tripod.com. It's been that long ago. And that one was FREE!

As a customer, I check out sites. If it's cluttered an non-navigable, I'll leave. I put false hope into well built sites. i know there must be more like me.

What would the price difference be monthly from a mediocre site to that of a "fancy-schmancy" one?

There should be very little in price difference on a month to month basis for a fancy web site vs a simple site. The difference would be in the design & rollout costs. Otherwise, you are paying too much on the "back end" of the deal.

For example, I am a hosting provider for small businesses in my city (and even for some small international groups). Hosting costs are usually small (starting around $8/month on up to $20 / month) compared to the cost for updates and maintenance (ie if the customer asks me to add a bunch of new content, or migrate to a new database / application etc.... usually ~$50 / hr for technical services).

The actual cost for hosting will be relatively small compared to the "buyout" costs of actually obtaining a web site & content for the initial launch. Feel free to PM / email me for more info / questions.

You cannot get the answer to your question on pricing here, not the way you want it answered.

I spent $1k having a design done, then $12 month for hosting. Then I changed to a new design that I did with a template that cost $100 and I like it much better.

You need to decide if you are having your site designed for you or are doing it yourself. Then you need to decide if you are going to pay for upkeep or do it yourself.

Flash designs are nice, but are very difficult to manage for SEO purposes. I have a new site that I put up and in less than two weeks it comes up at the top of google for a particular search term I sought after. If this can be done with a Flash site I would be surprised.

You need to decide what you want your site to do for you other than the obvious. If you are going to mainly get traffic from advertising links flash would be fine, but in order to get a decent search engine ranking you should avoid flash.

I personally live off of search engines and referrals, so I cannot use Flash, I would lose my search engine rankings.

My personal belief is that flash intros are a distraction. Your site needs to be designed to provide the info your potential customers are looking for immediately.

Your site design needs to target your target customers. For example if you are selling based on low prices, this needs to be addressed on your index page. if your target customers are not price conscious than you need to focus on showcasing your work on the first page.

Again, regarding flash, look at most site owned by web design firms. You will rarely see a flash intro. Why? Because when web designers build their own sites they use what works, and nothing more.

I had no idea that flash was hard to index. Thanks for the heads up on that!

What causes that? Why can't meta tags just be added for search capabilities? Are those even used anymore?

SEs look for text, properly tagged images, etc etc., it can't index flash. I don't know why. SEs really like text more than anything. Oh and of course the number of relevant links out there to your site is hugely important. BTW, I am not pretending to be an expert on this, I am just repeating what I've read and what has worked for me.

You can try to find out the why, but in the end, if you actually do the research, you will not want a flash intro anyway.

Ask yourself the question "Why do I want a flash intro? What will it accomplish for me? How much business will it bring me?" and don't forget the most important question: What are my customers looking for? Answer: (it depends on your target customer) The vast majority are looking for prices and/or samples. Design your site to have your best work on your index page or if you are competing strictly on price then your prices should or could be there.

Also keep in mind if you're marketing to brides the vast majority look for their videographer while at work on company time or while on lunch break. (This info was provided to me from the Knot.) My stats bear this out. Therefore, they don't have time to sit through long loading sites. They are moving quickly through websites one after another after another.

There are very successful photogs and videographers that have flash sites, this is well known and obvious. But your first site, purely from a business perspective should be focused on getting business, as Jason said. When you have enough direct visitors and links and referrals and advertising in place then you can move to flash, but even then it isn't necessary, it's just fluff.

It just occurred to me that I followed the links to the sample sites you put up, and without even thinking I never got to the sites, because I left before the first page loaded, as I don't have time or patience to sit through an opening page that takes so long to load it has to tell me how much progress is being made as I sit and wait for it.

I think many of your potential customers are the same as me. Not all of them, but most. People are working two jobs or are so busy in other ways that they don't have time to wait for a website to load.

Your job in trying to sell your service is to HELP the customer find the product she is looking for and present her the info she needs quickly and without a hassle.

When you understand how your potential customer thinks then you'll know how to design your site.

Wow, thanks Jeff. I definitely hadn't looked at it that way. I appreciate all of your help on this. It's a bit overwhelming.

I'll check into a few templates...

Good luck with the template search. It is no fun Alex. I am sure in the last few years I have spent many hundreds of hours on website design, because it is how I live and die. I hate doing websites, but I do it because I can't afford to spend what it costs to have it done, and I know exactly what I want, so it is easier in the end to do it myself. I have four of them.

The site I last had designed was put together using lots of flash elements, and was a bear to load. I had it up for less than six months before I replaced most of it. A very expensive lesson.

You really do want fast loading. That alone is an art, or science depending on how you look at it. Then you get into optimization for google, and that is a whole other area you will want to learn.

Another critical thing is how will they contact you? Wait until you get into contact forms for the web, that is really fun. I still have to have mine edited for me, because I refuse to spend the time to learn PHP, it gives me a headache.

Yahoo SiteBuilder is one place that provides the ability to use a contact form without any knowledge of PHP if you host with them, I'm sure there are others, but you have to use their template, I presume.

Alex I sent you a message. If you don't get it contact me and I'll send you a template I bought but never used. You can at least see what they are like.

Replied! Thanks!

Yahoo SiteBuilder is one place that provides the ability to use a contact form without any knowledge of PHP if you host with them, I'm sure there are others, but you have to use their template, I presume.

Alex - I use Yahoo Sitebuilder for my main site as well as my blog. Its nothing fancy but was easy to setup. I pay around $14/ month to maintain. I haven't done any Search Engine Optimization but still get about 20% of my leads from clients who found me via Google. I was thinking of upgrading to a flash site this year but may research a bit more after reading Jeff's comments.

Art

vargaproductions.com

Art, I started out with sitebuilder at Yahoo. Because of the ease in creating contact forms and the flexibility in design and the ease of inserting sample videos it was a PERFECT place to start.

I quit using Sitebuilder tool because their last upgrade didn't work properly for me, no matter what I did, so was forced into leaving it about a year or more ago.

After doing so much research my head hurt, when I upgraded I went the template route.

I must say that the site Don Bloom recommended for web templates and design looks very nice, and that is a place I would look at very hard. Appears to be top quality and extremely user friendly. I love the DIY feature of that place. Great stuff.

I am sure the sites recommended by the others are great too, just haven't looked at them.

Not to toot my horn too much (ok a little) but check out my site(s). They all run on php & MySQL, using lots and lots and lots of freely available templates (think of them as drop in graphics for a "look & feel") and just about any web dev knows how to make a template for the app I use.


This is why I like the non-flahs sites. Lots and lots of features, such as:

Embedding Video:
Embedding videos is trivial with a plugin I use, and adding content, changing content is about as easy as using MS word using the admin back end. The sites are viewable on any monitor size because the templating system can use either fixed width or variable templates. The load times are pretty fast, especially if I fine tune my database cache settings. Very little "big graphics" to load, so tiny wait time.

Easier to optimize and tweak:
I can create a new page / Menu in about 5 minutes. I can add a new video in less time.

Lots of traffic stats
Combined with many other strategies is how I have had a Google Page Rank of 2/10 for the past two years (most 1 person companies are 1/10 or not even listed in page rank). I get 20% direct traffic (bookmarks), 25% organic Google, and 55% referrals from other sites. I had 14 unique viewers to my site yesterday and average only a 25% bound rate (ie only 25% of visitors to my web site leave right away) and the rest spend an average 4 minutes on my site (that is viewing at least one sample video) and view an average of 4 pages.

I can tell you that in the last month, 10 people found my web site because they searched Google for "Video Deposition Rates" etc etc. I love stats and my site designs are specifically tailored to finding out the stats of what I do.

It might be hard to get that detailed of info on a purely flash based site. :-)

But Flash is improving its ability to provide meta data that can be indexed by bots, but I doubt it will reach the same level of search engine ease as plain text on a page.

Alex, give me a buzz (or PM). I can help you out with simple design as well.

I just created my blog with godaddy hosting, and it costed me nothing (except hosting costs). Free blog software, free template, free video hosting at vimeo. With a little tweaking of the template (change pics, colors, add/remove some sections) you should be happy at the beginning. And you will be able to manage the website on your own - no need to have web design knowledge (but sometimes it might help).

As far as the loan and bank - tell them it's $200 a year (if you do it my way :-)

I see you updated your site Jason, looks great.

I see you updated your site Jason, looks great.

hehe... you spying on me? ;-) but yes I revamped it in Jan. Thanks for noticing! Actually what I did was split weddings from everything else using the graphical theme my GFX guy made for me (hence the non- generic text logos).

That work right there was virtually the entire month of Janurary right there. Even doing it with my short cuts takes a lot of time. A lot of fiddling. etc. I spent way too much time on it.

I still would probably like to try the "fancy flash site" thing, may be if just for a showcase video gallery (of course I woudl need some real impressive footage to show first).

But I maintain, that getting my web site visitors works best by having lots of relevant content and good referrers (like wedding guide book web sites etc).

SEs look for text, properly tagged images, etc etc., it can't index flash.Yes, they can and they do. Adobe announced that Google was indexing flash sites in July 2008, but Google had been indexing links within flash sites for years prior. To see an example, enter the following search terms at Google: "video filetype:swf".

I still wouldn't say that flash is equivalent to clear text in terms of search indexing, but it's not the black hole it used to be.

Anyway, Alex, our full-service web design and development starts at $2500 and includes one year of hosting. After that, it's $15 per month. I'd say our average web project runs between $3500 and $4000. We're not the cheapest, but we're certainly not the most expensive.

Thanks for the clarification Chris.

As a web designer you are certainly the expert, not me. I do believe however that in the Cincinnati metro area not a single videographer with a flash site comes up in the first 50 results, and I know there are plenty of them.

My statement about flash not being indexed is obviously wrong, but it would appear that from a practical standpoint that at this point flash is still no more than an afterthought for the search engines.

Also, in my case, my 20 year-old bride-to-bes are not going to do a search for wedding video using the :swf suffix. Actually I don't know any average web-shopper that would. That is a useful bit of information, though, thank you.

I decided to abandon flash as well. The issues of load speed, updates (I can't program flash so i always had to hire someone), SEO indexing, but mainly it was ease of use and slow loads. If you are planning a small business loan, than I would get a few written quotes from hosts that will get you to where you want to be. The more detailed info you have for a loan the better off you will be, especially right now when most banks are hesitant to lend. In my case, I pay a little over $300 every 2 yrs for hosting/domain reg and do all my design in house with GoLive (a retired Adobe web design program.)

We can give you an idea of what we do, but for your loan I would seriously recommend getting specific quotes to show the bank you have done your homework. You also might want to include some expense for maintenance. The first site I launched, i tore down in 2 months because what i thought was good many others did not. It is an organic process.

Thanks for the clarification Chris.

Also, in my case, my 20 year-old bride-to-bes are not going to do a search for wedding video using the :swf suffix. Actually I don't know any average web-shopper that would. That is a useful bit of information, though, thank you.Lol, that was only to show you what flash results look like on Google... :) Flash results can and do show up without adding "filetype:swf".

I'm with you that well-formed HTML is best for search engine indexing, but just pointing out that flash isn't totally ignored.

Sorry, I've been away for a day due to bad weather out in Oklahoma. Thanks for all your help. Just from this, I really feel like I'll be steering away from the flash. For now anyhow. What sold me more than anything was the fact that people don't want to sit around and wait for that. I'm the same way. I get impatient enough with Vimeo, but at least you can pause those until fully loaded.

I have nothing set in stone, still, but I thank you for the assistance so far! It's been more help than you realize.

Flash is best when it's a part of a complete website, not the whole thing.

If you really want to see what works best and is most accepted (you know they test everything in front of focus groups) go look at what the "big dogs" are doing. Check out Apple, Chrysler, Xerox, Citibank, etc. Be sure to look at a wide range of industries. Of course, you won't be able to pour the same kind of cash into a website, but you'll be able to pick out key elements of usability and design that you can have incorporated into your website.

Along with Chris' idea, when doing that type of reseach you can also look around to see what the web design firms are doing also.

That was how I first got the idea that a full flash site or flash intro was not such a hot idea for me. I noticed that all (or most) of the sites that sell flash templates have non-flash sites. Many use elements of flash for preview purposes, but that seems to be all!