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I want to start building small-business websites next year. However, none of the small-businesses in my area seem to be willing to invest in 800-1000€ for a customised, bespoke site.
They understand that the cost comes from 40 hours work, which itself comes from the unique customisation of the site, and also from making the website more useful than a simple brochure site (eg. databasing functions, community building, e-commerce, CRM, advertising, or whatever the focus is). They don't begrudge that. It's just that they don't think they'll get good Return On Investment. However, they generally *are* still interested in having an online presence (isn't everyone?).
Now I could just ignore these people and just cater to the much smaller number of businesses who have less qualms about the initial investment. However, it seems to me like ignoring a *lot* of people.
Using the right tools, I could provide these people with a cookie-cutter Drupal site for 200€ (about 5 hours work). It will look nice, but not nearly as nice as a properly designed bespoke site. It will be a simple brochure site, but they can add content themselves. They won't have full access to their Drupal backend (ie. can't add modules or customise it) or have their own cpanel or ftp. I can run about 20 sites off of one codebase on one VPS so that updating/maintaining them all is easier.
Now, obviously putting these businesses online so cheaply means I will have to tie them into hosting with me (and/or some other value added service) for 10€ a month, and I'd make that a mandatory part of the package. I'd include the first year, so the total price they'd pay for getting their business online for the first year would be 300€, and 120€ after that.
Since they're hosted with me I would have constant contact with them, and I could help them with directing people to the site and increasing their SERP and ranking. A percentage of them might then think about expanding their site's capabilities and paying for extra functionality/features/design work later on.
Note that the idea is not to undercut designers. The idea is to provide a cheap initial cost for small business in my local area to get online, then making that initial loss back over time, and eventually encouraging them to spend the money on a more bespoke design anyway, once they've got a feel for how a website would help their business.
I'd like to build up over five years to having 100-200 such sites hosted.
I have evenings and a three-day weekend free at the moment.
If necessary, I can go down to a three-day week in my main job.
Comments please!
I'd especially like to hear from lone website designers who also initially thought they'd never get enough work from 800-1000€ websites (I'd need about 20 of these per year to make it worthwhile, and at the moment I have a skills deficit with regard to the kind of features/customisation these kinds of customers would demand, so I'd need to sub-contract a lot).
I'd also like to hear from small, lone reseller webhosts - how do you provide 24/7 support? How much support time would 100 hosted customers need?
Thanks everyone!
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