You would not chase, priest, for cheapness

The reason for writing this note was the discussion, which flared up on the article about travel sites, the specifics of their creation and pricing. A quote that has become an epigraph for a note belongs to the top manager of one of the agencies that participated in the discussion and developed travel sites for just 8,000 rubles and even 4,000 rubles.

Where is the firewood from?

Honestly, I was intrigued. How does a metropolitan agency, selling websites at that price, manage to exist? And in order to understand where such amounts came from, we decided to count a little and dragged our data on labor costs to create a simple website such as business cards from the storerooms. Calculations on the tourist site postponed until later.

So, according to the calculations of labor costs of the Internet-Client studio, a standard small website with a unique design requires about 20 hours of work of several employees: a manager, a programmer, a designer, a layout designer, a content maker and a tester. 20 studio hours, estimated in salaries, cost of jobs and depreciation of equipment, mandatory insurance and tax payments from salaries - this is about 17,000 rubles, or 850 rubles per hour of work. This is the cost price and the price of a standard simple site without a license, in case of choosing a paid CMS. And now we add profits here (it somehow should be), we take into account the need to invest a certain amount in the development fund (software updates, equipment, etc.), personnel training costs (not enough), taxes (to sleep well). In order for the company to at least keep afloat, it will take at least 10,000 rubles to build in excess of the cost price. The result is at least 27,000 for a site with a unique design on a free engine. But this is a site with an individual design. We took it for zeroing, and the results of such a comparison would not be representative.
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We try to reduce the price, and we refuse unique design. By the way, for many representatives of small businesses and small travel agencies, the rejection of the unique design is the only right decision, because to make the design unique and high-quality within the minimum budget is extremely difficult. Eliminating the unique design, they also built a complete boxed solution to minimize the participation of expensive specialists in the project creation. The break-even cost of a boxed standard website such as a business card was reduced to 10,000 rubles. Excluding payment license Bitrix. With a business card, everything is clear, take up the tourist site.

What for and why

Regarding travel sites specifically, more effort is needed here, because the tour site has its own specifics, in particular, architecture, which implies the interconnection of modules of the catalogs of countries, resorts and hotels, as well as the presence of freely switchable connectors with the search databases of travel systems. But the boxed solution in this case is several times cheaper than creating a project from scratch.

By the way, the price tag on these resources in the web development market ranges from 500,000 to 25,000, when developing a site from scratch. And from 13,000 to 4,000 and even 1,500 rubles for ready resources. 500,000 is by itself a unique and exclusive design, a dynamic prototype, a personal manager, good coffee at meetings, a comfortable meeting room, a worthy impressive portfolio. 13 000 for the finished box solution is also understandable. But where do the prices for a tour site in the lower price segment come from - 25,000 and 1,500 rubles? What travel site can you make for these amounts? There are several options for justifying such proposals:

• All without exception cheap and mega-cheap sites are made on free CMS. If we talk about simple business card sites and typical tourism resources, then WordPress and its own admin panel are most often used.
• Flies Site - separately, SEO cutlets - separately. The easiest way is when a website is built without taking into account any SEO requirements, even such simplest functions as automatic title generation. Moreover, some sites are sold at dumping prices altogether with the SEO module disabled. You want - pick and turn yourself. You do not want or you can not - we will do it for an additional fee,
• Template design is natural.
• Incomplete tagging. When in the tariff, contract or TK on the site is written "design-development-introduction", these three points can later be blown up to very impressive numbers. Or vice versa, when the item “content filling” is limited to filling in the main and contact page. Everything. “What did you want for such a sum? Here are the pages - these are the content. ” After all, how much and what to fill is not specified.

Of course, it is almost impossible to allocate 25, 30, 60, 100 thousand rubles to a site for an aspiring travel agency that has not yet reached a steady income for a website with an individual design and lots of cool lotions. Do not need. At the first stage of a fairly inexpensive boxed ready-made solution, which is enough "for the eyes." Moreover, the difference in 6-9 thousand rubles between a quality site and a ready-made site, will be almost imperceptible for the budget now, but it comes around with problems with usability, promotion, refinement and expansion of functionality later.

And yes ...
• There are always exceptions to the rule. Rarely, but possible. Sometimes the dumping price for a very decent site is put up for quick entry into the market or when you first order, seeking customer loyalty,
• A ready-made website with a template design, quite appropriate for a start-up company, will be mauvais ton for a well-known travel network,
• And what is cheap for a Moscow travel agency may be prohibitively expensive for a regional one.

So our little research concerned only proposals on Moscow. But whatever one may say, the regions or Moscow, if one goes through different price offers and finished works, in most cases one has to agree with the wisdom of the wise popular proverb “there is no good cheap.”