Budgeting for a Website

Tom Nixon (00:03.472)
Curtis Hays, what’s up, buddy?

Curtis Hays (00:06.348)
man, you know, just rolling podcast after podcast, week after week, just having fun. What’s rolling with you.

Tom Nixon (00:13.904)
Yeah. And well, I mean, you don’t get any colder than that cold open and you become a master at like just running the stride with it. So, I appreciate that. So, yeah. Well, we are going to welcome everyone back to the Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes podcast. We are going to welcome a new guest shortly who is sort of a buddy of yours and we’ll explain what we mean when we get to that point but we got a great topic today because it’s this question that we get all the time.

Curtis Hays (00:23.756)
I try.

Tom Nixon (00:43.44)
It’s the hardest thing to answer. A lot of times we’re asking the client the same question and they don’t have a good answer. And that is what should my budget be for a new website?

Curtis Hays (00:53.996)
Tell me your budget. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (00:55.472)
budget. Yeah. Do I have a budget? Do you have a budget? we don’t have a budget. Okay. It’s 50, 000. that’s too much. so you do have a budget. We just have to figure out what it is. So,

Curtis Hays (01:07.404)
We just have to figure out, yes. am I, am I low or am I high? You know, so, and you can never, you asked me to say a number. I can never come lower than, or I’m sorry. I can never go higher than the number I give you too. Right. So I’m going to shoot high because as soon as I give you a number, I can’t go low. So, no budgeting, for a website is it’s a difficult question. There’s some large ranges in there. So,

Tom Nixon (01:21.008)
That’s true, right.

Curtis Hays (01:36.204)
I’m excited to kind of talk about that conversation today. I think there’ll be some valuable information for a lot of people out there who, you know, hopefully you’re not having to go through this process and do a new website, but in all likelihood, at some point, if you’re in marketing over the next five years, you probably will. So utilize this knowledge or tell a friend.

Tom Nixon (01:58.032)
tell a friend, tell a buddy which is a good segue into welcoming our guest of Buddy Web Design and Development. Why don’t you introduce our guest today?

Curtis Hays (02:06.892)
So our guest, Scott Diger, I came across on LinkedIn about a year ago. I’m not sure exactly how, but scrolling through my feed, I saw a post and took a look at this agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan and his website, Buddy Web Design. So Scott is the founder and owner CEO of Buddy Web Design and just loved the brand. And so Buddy Web Design, Buddy, there’s a…

There’s a dog, I think maybe I’ll probably get this wrong, but like a chocolate lab maybe on the homepage. And I am a dog person, Tom, I think you’re a dog person, right? And, yeah, it’s just like fell in love. I called my daughter over. Who’s also a dog person is like, you got to check out this website. I wish I would have came up with this brand idea. So I had to reach out to Scott and be like, Hey, tell me about your company. Tell me about your brand.

Scott (02:42.544)
Yep. Yep.

Tom Nixon (02:47.92)
yeah, very much so.

Curtis Hays (03:05.292)
Is that your dog who’s in this photo? Cause it’s a really cool photo. And if so, what a cool dog. But, so welcome Scott, Scott, tell us, tell us about your brand. And I think you told me this is not your pup. Do you know whose puppet is?

Scott (03:18.532)
Yeah, so thank you for the very very kind words and kind introduction as well and very happy to be here too. So yeah, the company I run is called Buddy Web Design and Development. And you’re right, if you go to the Buddy homepage, you’ll see in the hero section a stock photo of a black lab. And my intention with the brand with the name Buddy and with the black lab iconography was I

You know, brands are pretty nebulous. They’re kind of what you make of them, right? But my intent with the name and the imagery was to create a brand that evoked friendliness, something timeless, iconic, relatable. And to me, like I’m kind of an outdoorsy guy. So I like brands like Eddie Bauer, LL Bean that have a lot of, you know, Subaru Outbacks and Black Labs and things like that too. So, and I do have a black lab named Bo.

But yeah, I like that imagery and idea of building a company where we’re dependable, reliable, timeless, easy to work with, friendly, that kind of stuff like your buddy.

Curtis Hays (04:18.348)
I think he knocked it out of the park. What do you think, Tom?

Scott (04:20.432)
Thanks.

Tom Nixon (04:20.912)
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I couldn’t have done better myself. As a matter of fact, I have a fledgling record label that I named after my first ever dog who is now deceased. She was a Vichla. They’re like rust colored, paprika colored dogs. And so I called it red dog records in honor of her. So I can relate. Well, let’s talk about budgeting. You know, when we had our sales coach on, he brought up the fact that the talking about money is not.

Curtis Hays (04:40.396)
Aww.

Tom Nixon (04:50.128)
necessarily uncomfortable shouldn’t be, but it is for a lot of people. And I guess we should start by stating for the record, Scott, that there’s a different budget for every different website in the world. Is there not?

Scott (05:00.208)
Yeah, and budgets are going to vary, and will kind of generalize as tiers also. I mean, I tell folks now when I first started in web design, just gave my first projects. I jokingly say, but this is kind of true. My ideal client was if you could A, fog a mirror and B, write a check, you were my perfect client. And my projects were like a couple hundred bucks for a basic website. And we’ve grown now our team. You know, we do, we like to say and think we do really good quality work. So we’re not, we’re not.

cheap anymore, but I know having worked at a big organization prior to starting Buddy, like I know there are agencies that charge way, way higher than we do also. So I mean, you’ll, you’ll see the whole gamut that depends on, you know, how big your site is, what features you want, what type of developer you’re working with. If they’re a solo freelancer who’s getting rolling versus a huge agency, that kind of stuff. So yeah, it’s a lot, a lot of levers, a lot of variables there.

Curtis Hays (05:56.684)
Scott, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on to have this conversation. Cause you actually don’t come from this, agency world sort of by trade, right? You have an MBA, right? And I think you were in the medical field, not as a medical practitioner per se, but you were working in the medical industry and utilizing that MBA. So, I mean, I think, you know, large scale projects, planning, project planning and project budgeting is a background you have, right?

Scott (06:17.712)
Yeah.

Scott (06:26.832)
Yeah, exactly. To try to give a quick synopsis, like you said, my background’s business, specifically startups, innovation, product development, that sort of thing. I spent most of my career in the startup realm, both with other companies, launching my own stuff. But prior to starting Buddy, I spent just about a decade working for a really big healthcare system here in Western Michigan, helping lead up their innovations program. So it was a lot of high tech healthcare, project management, budgeting, those sort of things, working with vendors.

What led me to Buddy though, actually, is after being there for quite a few years was kind of looking for what was next and thought that while that job I had was super cool, it was pretty niche. There wasn’t like I could just go across to different hospital and have a similar role. So I thought, well, why don’t I focus more on an IT kind of career track. And with that thought, you know, I’ve got experience leading teams, leading tech projects. I get the space, but why don’t I just to kind of bulk up my resume, learn some coding just for competency and credibility. But.

I took some online courses, just self -directed, learned web development and really liked it. And then found Upwork .com, the freelancing website. So that’s kind of how I got started. And my intention initially wasn’t to pivot from operations leadership or those sort of things to be a coder per se, but just kind of evolved that way. And Buddy grew to the point where now I’ve got a team of developers. So it’s funny, I kind of…

went from operational tech leadership to development, now back to operational leadership in the space too, but now running an agency. So you’re right, that’s how it came, but it definitely from budgeting and having conversations with clients, I definitely approach things from a business operations, business owner standpoint first, that gets a tech side, but it doesn’t get bogged down with all the tech speak and that kind of stuff.

Tom Nixon (08:12.464)
Well let’s help… god.

Scott (08:13.392)
And that was actually good. I was going to add that it was interesting transitioning to, I was going to share that one thing I heard a lot in my first sales conversations from clients was, Scott, when I talk to you, it’s interesting because you just speak in layman’s terms. Whereas I speak with other developers who are freelancers at that point too. That was my direct competition who will so quickly get into tech speak and just lose folks. And it was interesting learning how understanding budgeting, what it’s…

you know, what it’s like being a business owner that made a huge difference just for rapport, understanding that kind of stuff.

Curtis Hays (08:47.916)
I’ll say I had a similar experience, because I came from IT help desk background. So I was interfacing with users all of the time, trying to not do tech speak, but bring things to layman’s terms, explain it so they could understand it, but then fix their problem, which is all they really cared about. And that transitioned me well again, you know, into agency ownership, which is kind of being that liaison to, you know,

facilitate and organize the project, so to speak, but then have the people who can, you know, solve the problem on the back end. So.

Scott (09:20.176)
Mm -hmm.

Tom Nixon (09:22.008)
Alright, guys. So, let’s help somebody listening, figure out what their budget would be for the hypothetical website that they are considering, alright? For their own company and I said at the outset, there’s a different budget for every website, right? There’s everything from free, right? Like a Wix and a Weebly and I’ll put free in air quotes for the listeners because you have to consider costs being tradeoffs and things that that website can’t do that you might need it to do.

And then there’s seven figure websites or more, right? So there’s that’s a huge range. All right. So that’s not helping anybody. Where do we start in terms of for me? And I’ll pose this to Scott. I think that the listener, the user, the prospect is considering a website first needs to put in their mind that I hope it doesn’t go over this amount figure, right? Like, what is the upper limits of your appetite? Because that’s going to help the developer bracket a scope of work and then ultimately sorry, simultaneously.

Scott (10:06.736)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (10:15.664)
What does this website need to do? If it doesn’t need to do a whole heck of a lot, then freeze probably your answer. But if it needs to do something, what is that something? And then you need to map that to the budget that you’re saying. I hope it doesn’t go over. Right? Is it so Scott? Am I close? How do you work with clients?

Scott (10:28.912)
Yeah, I totally agree too. I think probably if you’re looking to get a website built, you need a lease and gut check. What, what degree or like what general range like do you have, if you’re asking the question, you probably don’t have the million dollar budget, right? So more realistically, 80 20 rule, you’re thinking, do I have a budget or is this have to be just dirt cheap? Like I’m starting a business, it’s bootstrap. Like I’ve got to just check the box website done.

Tom Nixon (10:45.328)
True.

Scott (10:57.968)
That’s probably what I call tier one. Tier two is, you know, I’ve got some money, but not enough. And then there’s kind of variants on that also. So I think that first gut check is, you know, am I talking less than a thousand, one to five, 10 ,000 plus, or those sorts of things. And granted, if you’ve got a freelance developer who normally charges 500 bucks, I’m sure they would be happy to charge more for their services. But I think kind of once you have those reference points, you kind of unlock who you should be targeting. If it is just.

do it yourself, is it a freelancer who maybe is getting started, maybe has less experience, or can you work with an agency who’s got more robust resources, those sort of things also too. So I think kind of those degrees is probably that first question. From there, usually when I start talking to folks, and I do try to offer a little transparency on our website, kind of where we play, I just try to let people filter in accordingly, but I tell folks a lot of times that the biggest levers are,

Do you need e -commerce or not? What general functionality? And then how many pages are there? Is it 20 pages? Is it one page? Because that’s where just starting off a lot of that variance comes into play.

Tom Nixon (12:09.072)
Yeah, Curtis, I’m going to ask you in a second follow on to that. But before I do, I just want to interject and tell listeners you’ve written a blog post. I think it may be even been the blog post that maybe you first caught your eye, Curtis, but it’s called five things to consider when creating your website budget. We’re going to link to that in the show notes. So this takes you through chapter and verse every question you’d ever want to ask and have answered to create your own budget. So, Curtis, I wanted to ask you along the way. So when we’re budgeting for a new website, there’s a few things that you think most people.

Scott (12:23.76)
Thank you.

Tom Nixon (12:38.736)
forget to include, right? They’re sick. They know they have to design it probably and develop it, but what are people missing or overlooking in establishing their budget?

Curtis Hays (12:48.812)
Yeah, it’s usually content. And when I say content, it’s written words on the page, which if you are freelancing with a developer, you maybe don’t want the developer writing the copy that’s going on your website. Can they really tell your story? And then the potential creative that goes along with that, which would be photography or videos, whether it’s stock or you’re going to get photography created, you know, stuff actually shot.

There’s costs associated with that. In the thousands of dollars usually, I mean, that could easily be 20, 25 % of your total project costs could be in content. So it’s definitely a question we ask right off the bat is who’s going to create the content for the website. We can build it. We’re going to be building it in WordPress. Buddy, web development, I believe you guys also are designing in WordPress. So you have sort of a certain,

class of customer, so to speak, that is looking for a WordPress type site, if they’re doing content management or they’re doing e -commerce, their blogging and different things like that. So we kind of have the fundamentals around what it is we’re building. And then it is kind of, okay, well, what’s the quantity 10 pages, five pages. We’ll call that the site map. What’s the site map look like? What is the content in it from a rough structure that’s going to be going on these pages?

And then who’s responsible for creating that. And if it’s, if it’s a third party and it’s not you, there’s can be costs associated with that. And even if it’s you, there’s costs associated with it, your time or an employee who’s, who’s doing it. So you can’t forget about content.

Tom Nixon (14:32.816)
Yeah, and if I could put a plug in for content too is maybe we just for the sake of expediency, we eliminate that DIY or from this conversation because you could have all of this for free. You could go to Weebly or Wix. You could pick a template. You could have chat GPT write your content for free. You could use stock photos. But going back to my earlier question, what do you expect that website to do for you? Right. It’s stock photos, a pre -designed template in words that you haven’t written that don’t mean anything to anybody. So.

I think we need to move beyond that for the sake of this argument, Scott, and say, let’s talk about the 5 ,000 to 25 ,000 range maybe and see if we can hone in from there. Okay. So you mentioned e -commerce. What are some of the other major considerations you need to know in order to scope out and budget a website?

Scott (15:10.512)
Yep. Yeah.

Scott (15:18.992)
Yeah, I think like Curtis was alluding to, too, I mean, there’s basic housekeeping stuff like you need a domain, you need hosting, you need to think, too, once the site’s live, maintenance, are you going to do that yourself as far as keeping things up to date, both content -wise and the underlying technology platform, too? But even just adding to what Curtis was saying, too, about that content, one aspect, kind of, maybe, I’ll say tier one of writing is just…

getting words written, getting them correctly where they flow right, are accurate to your company and industry. But then a second thing to look at that can ratchet up costs also is SEO or search engine optimization. So you could just write some paragraphs that are relevant to your website business. But then if you also want to think about getting your website found, a big part of how that happens is through doing some research on what keywords are out there that have a lot of people searching for them but maybe aren’t as competitive.

How do you bake those into headers and to actual text themselves, those sort of things. So whether your text is just written or written and SEO optimized are kind of two tiers as well that can increase the price quite a bit also.

Tom Nixon (16:28.432)
And then I think people also, in addition to what you said, Curtis, the other thing they overlook is they think the website’s a project and it has a definitive end and then it’s no longer cost them anything. but there’s maintenance costs, right? You need to have, if it’s a WordPress site, you need to have somebody who knows what they’re doing, updating the plugins, updating WordPress, protecting from vulnerabilities. there’s all sorts of things, but there’s also content too. Cause if you want to rank for search and you think your brand new website that has five pages in a few keyword phrases on it is going to be competitive in search.

You’re going to be sorely disappointed because what is going to compete in search now is helpful content that is authoritative, that is user friendly. And this needs to be a dynamic website that lives and breathes and continues on past its birthday in the form of whatever your content strategy is, blogging articles, white papers, videos, et cetera. Isn’t that true? What else are people missing? Yeah.

Curtis Hays (17:19.692)
That is, yeah, no, no, that is true, especially in the B2B sort of lead gen world that we operate in is you’re going to need to have people who are updating content on a regular basis. They’re serving content out to your users. Now we want to make that easy to do. And then oftentimes we train our clients how to update and create a new blog post or change content on the website. Scott, I think you guys are using Elementor as well, right? Which is a…

which is a page builder inside of WordPress makes it very easy and user friendly for customers to update. Even you can do it, Tom. Yeah. But what I can’t do is the writing prior to that. Right. So we’ve, we’ve got to, you got to pay sort of this upfront part to get this stuff set up properly. And then your team’s trained so that you can create content post launch.

Tom Nixon (17:51.184)
Even I can do it.

Scott (18:11.664)
To add to that too, even if you say, hey, we as a team, we’re going to do the blog writing going forth and those sort of things, to do things what I’ll loosely call the right way, you’ll want to be deliberate as far as as you write blog posts, doing things that are topically relevant for your brand and are helpful for your customers, but also being cognizant of the keywords too. So you might also want to factor budget -wise into not just, hey, no cost for writing blogs because we’ll do it.

But if you’re gonna research what keywords you might wanna subscribe and manage your SEO through SEMrush or Ahrefs or one of those tools also where, you know, it’s another monthly or annual expense to just use a tool to see, you know, what keywords should we target, how are blogs tracking, where are the Google results, those sort of things too. And SEO, you know, gets into its own beast and own wormhole as far as budgeting, how that works, those sort of things. But that is one more thing too. Like you said, once the site’s live, it’s not necessarily done, it’s…

part of that ongoing marketing budget, that bigger picture of how are you driving folks to your site and drawing people in.

Tom Nixon (19:16.912)
Yeah, I think people need to seek out like a very honest consultant who can tell the perspective website purchaser, buyer, builder, whatever, what the table stakes are and what the all in like Cadillac should could be or should be because I’d like to ask you both a question. I’d like you both to answer it. And that is when a company comes to you, they have an existing website and it’s just not performing or they can’t tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s just there’s a feeling that.

It’s not working. Their traffic’s not there. Their leads aren’t there, whatever. What are some of the most common things that you find that people have overlooked probably to save budget that are now they’re either paying for because the website’s not drawing in business or they’re paying a new developer to add on because they neglected it the first time around. Who wants to go first?

Curtis Hays (20:04.396)
I’m going to let Scott go first because he’s our guest, but I do have some good ideas on this one.

Scott (20:09.136)
Yeah, and this is a really, it’s a really tricky question too, because I’ve got that question once in a while and it’s, you need to think really holistically about things. And this is where, you know, kind of circling back to the first part of our conversation, you put the business cap on more so than just the website. I mean, there are some website things you can look at, like if you look at the homepage, for example, or landing pages, does it look nice? Do they look like a good credible business? Is it clear right away what they do and what the value proposition is?

Is the load speed appropriate? Are you waiting forever? Is it mobile responsive? So there are some like technical UI type things you can look at as well. But then at a more macro level too, you think about positioning because even if a website looks good, it functions well, it has pretty pictures. If you’re not offering a product that’s a good value proposition to folks, doesn’t matter. They’re not going to click through if your prices are way off or people just don’t care.

And then you think about too, how are you driving folks to the website? Are they finding you through, are you relying just on SEO? And as we probably all have known, if you’re following SEO this year, Google’s had a lot of algorithm changes and a lot of people taking big hits. So that could drive things or are using paper click or is it referrals? So, so for me, if somebody is looking for a website audit of like, Hey, why isn’t my website getting the results I’m looking for? You know, one thing I try to tell people is part of it is.

we can look at the website and just kind of look at that primarily through the aesthetics functionality. But, you know, it’s probably a bigger business picture too, that we do look at that’s maybe just a website or fresh alone could or couldn’t help out with.

Tom Nixon (21:48.688)
Great Curtis ideas.

Curtis Hays (21:49.996)
Yeah, so everyone, when they think of a website, thinks of what they can see and interact with. But there’s so many things behind the scenes. This is where I see companies getting, either things are being overlooked or maybe getting nickeled and dimed by other agencies. So I’ll give some examples, which are directly from the question you asked, right? So analytics is often overlooked. They just slap in a plugin, throw in a,

Scott (21:50.896)
Thank you.

Curtis Hays (22:19.564)
Analytics code and think they’re collecting the right data. They’re collecting some data But is that the right data that’s going to help that business know whether or not the website is performing appropriately whether they’re meeting their marketing goals whether that’s tied into other marketing channels and they’re pushing conversion actions and those types of things to Facebook and Google and all of that so

Measurement is a huge piece, which is very much overlooked and that’s tying into a lot of other technologies. So just talking about analytics and cookies, you now have cookie consent banners. That’s not just a pop -up that is informational that their cookie consent, proper cookie consent is integrated with a third -party tool that actually allows the user to control the cookie behavior so they can opt in or opt out of specific cookies. And it does auditing on the backend.

So there’s costs associated with those tools, subscription costs, as well as the setup itself. Then we move into accessibility. Does your website need to be compliant for people with disabilities? People who might be using a screen reader or have vision issues and you have color contrast issues on your website. So I just had a client who was going to get charged by an agency additional on top of

their web development cost to make it compliant. So, again, I think you have to outline likely what all your needs are. And that needs to be a pretty detailed list. And then when you go to that agency, make sure that all that stuff is going to be part of a package. Tom, we just did an episode with sales and contracts.

Like look at that contract and everything that’s included. Cause the last thing you want to do is agree on a budget, sign off on a project only to find out there’s a whole bunch of things you wanted, but didn’t articulate it appropriately that now that that individual or agency is going to charge you extra for, but you need them.

Scott (24:27.44)
Mm -hmm.

Tom Nixon (24:27.504)
Yeah. Or you thought we were included, but because maybe, maybe there’s a developer again, talking over your head, saying a bunch of acronyms. You’re like, wait, did he say PPC or SEO or, you know, URL or whatever? It’s like, I thought I had it. So going back to like finding an honest broker, what you didn’t mention, and then I’ll come back to you, Scott is, conversion tracking. So maybe you did, but the way that you’re following users around the site into the site off of the site,

Curtis Hays (24:30.092)
or you thought were included.

Curtis Hays (24:39.692)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (24:51.308)
I did, yeah.

Tom Nixon (24:56.72)
And making sure there’s complete transparency. I find people sometimes mail that part of it in because they think of a conversion, either somebody bought the product or didn’t buy the product. And that’s all they want to know. It’s a pass fail, but the customer journey is so much more complex than that. And if you’re not watching all of that data flow, then you’re missing a huge opportunity to improve those metrics, right?

Curtis Hays (25:17.804)
Yeah, I think the question that we should be asking as an agency to the client is like, why are we doing this project and how would you define success? You know, after the project is launched six months down the road, what KPIs are you going to use? That informs us on, again, you know, all of those measurement metrics. It informs the entire project and how we approach it. But then what is it we’re supposed to be measuring, which then allows us to set up those analytics models. Scott, have you included now in your.

projects are you guys doing like Google Tag Manager implementations?

Scott (25:51.472)
We haven’t. So we do more of the foundational stuff. So when it comes to marketing, I try to be really clear that, you know, what we’re going to focus on is building, designing, building, launching, optimizing a really good site. When it comes to SEO, we’ll tee things up for that foundation. So, you know, speed, responsiveness, using headers, those kinds of stuff as well. But I try to really delineate, you know, if you want help that ongoing stuff, you know, we’re more of a web design development shop and we do do some SEO work as well, but we really don’t get into the metrics of marketing, that kind of stuff as well.

Maybe down the road, but not right now as much. So part of my job is helping with communication. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (26:24.012)
which is perfect.

Yeah. And, and I think, you know, again, communicating specifically to your prospect or your client, what it is that you guys are good at and specializing in, and then letting them know, these are the things that we’re not going to do. So either, you know, do those internally or we’ll help you find resources to help you implement those things and do those things. But they definitely, you know, end up part of the conversation somewhere, in the process.

Scott (26:39.856)
Yeah.

Scott (26:52.496)
Yeah. And I think one of the things we definitely don’t want to have happen both for ourselves or for an agency or a customer too, is you work together for several months, you spend all this time, money, then they launch a site and they’re like crickets, you know, like, why is this working? So, I mean, it’s, it’s really important to be clear upfront as, you know, what we’re going to do, how to make it successful. We’re not going to do all those sorts of things because I do think, you know, there’s a fair amount of folks that,

Tom Nixon (26:52.816)
It’s speaking. Yeah.

Scott (27:21.968)
are in the kind of you build it, they’ll come mentality and that’s not how it works. You can have a great site, but it’s still gotta get found. It’s gotta attract, you gotta be driving conversions, all those sort of things also that we’re talking about here.

Tom Nixon (27:34.128)
Yeah. My piece of advice on budgeting would be to consider the budget as like an ongoing dialogue. So if you know, you get a quote back from Curtis or Scott is $18 ,000 in the number that you’ve neglected to tell them was I can’t go over 10. You know, don’t consider that the end of the conversation. So when these guys are too expensive, I would ask Curtis or Scott, I was hoping for it to be closer to 10. Can you help me explain what the additional 8 ,000 gets me? And are there things, you know, what, if I start taking those things away, what are the trade -offs?

Scott (27:36.848)
So, here’s a bucket. It’s like a cup.

Tom Nixon (28:04.08)
And then there’s clarity around, well, maybe the website should be 18 ,000 or maybe a competitor quoted 10 ,000, but they didn’t include X, Y, Z, you know, all these other features that now I understand from Scott Curtis are critical.

Curtis Hays (28:17.164)
We just ran into this exact example, Tom. We were quoting a prospect and the prospect came back, said, I’m comparing your quote to another quote, apples to apples. You guys included a bunch of backend technical pieces that they’re excited about, but we didn’t include marketing strategy. So they asked for, well, what would strategy look like if we worked with you guys? Can you help us with that? So then we had that conversation. We amended the quote. So.

I think that was good due diligence on the prospect side to say, let me compare and let me make sure that, you know, what it is I’m getting at the end of the day is what I’m looking for and are the prices I’m getting from these different companies comparable.

Tom Nixon (29:01.552)
Yeah. And I think there was probably the realization of what Scott said earlier, which is the website isn’t just a discreet like asset. It’s part of an overall business, strategy and discussion. So I think it was like, all right, we’re going to invest this much in that, but why are we doing that? Because we haven’t even established what our marketing strategy is yet. Right. So it’s like, how do we build a website if we don’t know what the marketing strategy is? Well, good question. So Scott, I just wanted to, give you a chance to plug something you announced in April.

going back to affordability and being flexible. These new grow as you go plans. So tell people what those are and why you decided to unroll them.

Scott (29:38.736)
Yeah, we’ve actually, so in the spring we rolled out, we call grow as you go plans are basically all in one. I think I’m actually going to rename it all at once. It makes a little more sense, but essentially what we’re trying to do is as we were talking about a website’s not just a build it and then it’s done. It’s this ongoing thing we’re trying to do through these all in one or grows you go plans is basically make having a great website, an affordable part of your, your monthly marketing budget.

So instead of saying, hey, I’m going to spend $10 ,000, $18 ,000 upfront for this big site, basically what we’re doing is just making that a monthly subscription program. So in our plans through Buddy, basically what you get through a monthly fee that hopefully fits nicely in a marketing budget is we’ll build the site, design and development, test it, optimize it, help with hosting. We can host the site if you’d like us to, but then also offer ongoing maintenance and updates.

So basically what we’ll do is get up and live to your custom specifications the way you want to look. Behind the scenes, every week we’ll go and update plugins, the underlying technology, so it’s always secure up to date. If you want any content changes down the road once it’s live, just email us. We’ll swap in new text and a team member, those sort of things. But basically what our hope is is if you’re a company where, let’s say you’re a roofer, for example, if you just get one more new lead,

through the website that we’re managing for you that covers the cost, you know the website also. So yeah, so yep. Yep, and then some hopefully too. So just trying to make it really affordable for folks and offer really good service and kind of foster long -term relationships. But yeah, if you’re if anyone listening is interested, you can check out our website at buddywdd .com and I guess there’ll probably be a link from the blog post as well too. Yeah, thanks for the chance to share about that.

Tom Nixon (31:04.048)
And then some.

Tom Nixon (31:23.024)
Absolutely. Yeah. Alright, Curtis, any final thoughts of budgeting words of advice before we thank Scott and let him get back to building awesome websites?

Curtis Hays (31:33.708)
Well, I think that’s a smart move by Scott. I do something somewhat, I offer what I call a managed service plan for your website. Very similar. I’m now standing behind a new website development. I’ve actually, as part of the cost, I’m providing a whole year of support. So launch a website. I’m standing behind that website for an entire year. Anything goes wrong with it. Plus I’m going to update it. And then at the end of that year, if you’re confident you can handle things on your own. Great.

We’ll leave you to it. Otherwise you can move into one of those managed services plans. So I think it’s a great idea, Scott. Your model is slightly different than mine, but we’ve got slightly different business models. But the end of the day, the focus is on that planned cost that the client can put into their marketing budget that they’re not then, you know, we don’t want them to have surprises.

Basically, right? So if they can plan their costs on a monthly basis, yearly basis, and they don’t have surprises, they’re going to be a happier customer. So that’s the idea behind these types of things is so they can plan them better. So I think that’s a really smart move. So yeah, I really appreciate you coming on Scott today and having this conversation. Like I said, you do great work. I see the sites that you post on LinkedIn, helping a lot of local businesses in Michigan and I’m sure beyond Michigan, but.

Scott (32:45.84)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (33:01.1)
really sharp design work. And I know the back end’s great. I’ve seen the elementary work and stuff that you’re doing, so keep up the great work and making other Michigan people proud of the agencies that are here in Michigan.

Tom Nixon (33:14.416)
Yes, sir.

Scott (33:14.48)
Thanks and definitely want to give an obligatory shout out to the Buddy team members too. As the company’s evolved, I’m definitely out of the weeds a lot more so. So I think the compliments are definitely a reflection of the team members we’ve got with Buddy’s too. So thanks for saying that. I really appreciate it.

Curtis Hays (33:27.052)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (33:27.888)
Great. Alright. Thanks, Scott. I my final thought is because you mentioned the word cost at the end, Curtis is going back to helping the listener self -identify a budget range and if you’re considering this a cost that I would say I would steer you more towards the we believe the wicks and the freelances of the world. The minute you start considering this an investment is when you need to call Scott or call Curtis because that’s when the stakes are higher and the site can do way more for you. So, those are my parting thoughts. I’ll give you some parting shots.

Bullhorns and bullseyes. We’ll see you next time.