There are many companies out there who advertise absurdly cheap websites. Many small businesses find these offers difficult to refuse.
For small, informational projects with not much growth ambition, getting these types of companies to set you up with a cheap site is fine. But what we are seeing is a lot of people who originally choose this option are now “locked in” to those companies’ systems.
For example, one of our clients identified the fact that their website was not responsive and therefore would get hurt by the updates to Googles ranking algorithm. To solve this, they came to us. We quickly discovered that the company that built their website originally allowed no control over the source code of their website – we couldn’t adjust HTML, CSS – nothing. Instead, they told us that the only way to convert to responsive and make website mobile friendly was to get them to do the work – and provided us with a set cost.
They were locked in and had no control over their own website. That didn’t sit well with them, so we stepped in. The TC Ink Web team were able to rebuild the site, almost exactly as it was before, but in a mobile friendly form. We also built it on our favourite CMS, WordPress, giving our client all the control, flexibility and benefits that come with it. They went from being dictated by their web design company, to having complete control over their site – a complete turnaround, and TC Ink Web did all this for around the same cost as they were going to charge just for the responsive upgrade.
So if you are in the market for a new website, have a good think about your future plans and be very careful before approaching one of these cheap providers. Do you really want to be locked in to their schemes? Or if you are already in this situation, give us a call. I am sure we can help you out as well and give you a far better system!