Large up-front cost.
The average small to medium-sized business website typically costs anywhere between £15,000 - £50,000, a substantial up-front cost.
Whilst many web hosting sites, designers and developers will talk about much lower costs on their websites, these examples are usually very basic and unrealistic.
A fully costed, commercial website that meets business needs will be many times those costs. The true cost of developing a website is likely not an insignificant proportion of your marketing budget. And it is also paid in full before even knowing what impact the website will have on your business.
Large time & resource commitment.
In addition to the up-front expense, the average SME website typically takes three months or more to complete and requires a great deal of resource and energy from your team. With no possible return on investment until after it launches.
Over budget, often late and inflexible.
Even if the budget and time is approved, there are so many moving parts, people and steps involved in a website project that it’s difficult to estimate the cost accurately and to determine exactly how long the project will take.
Unfortunately, many website projects are delivered late and/or over budget. This would not only delay any results or feedback from your website, it would also reflect poorly on you in the eyes of your partners, whoever you report to, and other department heads.
Because new websites are usually delivered to a rigid brief without the benefits of either past experience or feedback, they are often badly matched to the real world and difficult to realign once launched, due to the inflexible nature of their structure.
No guarantee of improved performance.
You will be held accountable for a measurable increase in results from your new website. So then the question becomes: after all the time, money and resources you’re putting into your website redesign, how do you (or the agency you’ve hired) know that what you’re finally launching is going to be the best possible performing website?
The answer is you can’t, it’s impossible.
All you can do with traditional website redesign is look through any past usage data you might have, conduct, or commission user research and then formulate a hypothesis of what you believe will be a high-performing website.
Then your hypothesis is implemented and never validated to see whether your thinking was indeed correct. If it’s not, well, we’ve all heard horror stories of websites being launched and performance tanking for one reason or another.