Every website project starts with the same three wishes. People want it good, they want it fast, and they want it cheap. Fair enough too. The catch is that you get to pick two, not all three.
That isn’t a sales line. It’s true of almost any project, from building a house to printing a brochure, and a website is no different. Once you can see the trade-off, choosing what matters most gets a lot easier.
The three corners
- Good: well built, reliable, easy to use and made to last.
- Fast: a quick turnaround to hit a deadline or an opening.
- Cheap: the lowest cost up front.
How the trade-offs play out
- Good and fast won’t be the cheapest. You’re paying for skill and focus to get it done properly and on time.
- Good and cheap won’t be fast. Quality on a tight budget means waiting while it’s fitted in around other work.
- Fast and cheap won’t be good. Something quick and low cost almost always gives somewhere, usually in the parts you can’t see until later.
The corner to watch
Fast and cheap is where most of the website trouble we see begins. A template put together over a weekend looks fine on day one. A year on, the plugins are out of date, the person who built it has moved on, and the site that was meant to save money is costing it, in lost enquiries and a rebuild that arrives sooner than anyone planned.
Plenty of the website rescues we do started life in that corner. There’s no judgement in it. It’s simply what tends to happen when price is the only thing on the table.
Our Pick Two page lets you toggle any two and see the trade-off you’re accepting. It takes ten seconds.
Where we sit
We build for good, at a fair pace, and we’re not the cheapest. Then we stick around to look after what we’ve built, and that part matters more than it sounds. The real cost of a website isn’t just the build. It’s everything after it: the updates, the backups, the security, and having a real person to call when something breaks. A cheap site with nobody looking after it is the most expensive kind there is.
If the lowest price is what matters most to you, we’ll happily point you towards a better fit, with no hard feelings. We’d rather do that than take the job and let you down.
The bottom line
Decide which two matter most before you start, and choose someone whose strengths match. If you want a website that’s built well, delivered when it should be and looked after long after launch, that’s what we do, and the first conversation is always free.
