Q&A

Madison + Fifth has built and managed more than 350 websites across a wide range of business categories from professional service firms to industrial clients, not for profits, retail, restaurants, entertainment and online-only. There’s a good chance we can work with you. If we feel we know someone who specializes in your space and could do a better job, we’ll definitely provide a referral.

We always provide a timeline in our proposals with the average being 8 – 12 weeks for most of our projects. Project length is always dependent upon the availability of content and feedback during the production process.  We’ve executed rush projects and smaller promotional sites in 4 weeks or less.  Some projects have taken 16 – 24 weeks because of their complexity.

We’ll help kick things off with a Discovery session to gather your business goals so we can create the right plan.  We’ll want you to invite all the people who will be affected by or have a say in your new website.  If you don’t have a ‘creative brief’ or ‘style guide’ for us to work from that defines your brand’s visual identity (fonts, colors, logo treatments and photography style), we’ll need to create one for you.  It’s additional expense but will make your life much easier for a long time when you need new graphics or collaterals created by other providers.

We provide basic SEO services (page titling and description tagging) so search engines can accurately index your site.  We’ll advise on copy strategies to assist your on-page copy with meeting basic SEO standards.  If you intend to purchase search advertising or are in a highly competitive business category, we will recommend contracting a dedicated SEO provider equipped with of-the-moment knowledge for optimizing your brand’s performance in search.

We can and do. We advise clients to meet the AA standard of WCAG v2.1. The AA standard is the second of three tiers of accessibility compliance. The AAA, highest standard, is primarily used by government and entities whose primary audience is persons with disabilities.

The range is extremely wide. We don’t take on projects unless we feel the dollars spent can be won back within a reasonable amount of time.

Projects that include business strategy, development of a creative brief and website features requiring configuration or connection to third party services are much different from basic websites requiring only a few pages to assure the business can be found online.

There are many DIY platforms (Wix, SquareSpace, for example) that can deliver a solid result for people willing to take the time to build or hire a freelancer to configure a site. This generally lowers your budget to a few thousand dollars for quality work but DIY platforms may have limited custom features you can enable or may not allow specific customization to suit your business needs.

Our projects tend to be for businesses with an established marketing budget equivalent to about 3% of the company’s gross revenue.  (We don’t take the entire 3-percent!)  This percentage is just a good benchmark for figuring the total amount a small to medium-sized business should be allocating to marketing expenses beyond staffing cost.

Business websites have a relatively long life and we always design for a minimum 3- but more likely 5-year lifespan. When figuring out whether the cost justifies the results, remember to amortize the cost over at least three years for a well-produced design that won’t age quickly. It’s a suit your business will wear for a while.

This is a range of cost from as little as $25/month if you are hosting directly with a service such as GoDaddy and plan to do all updates yourself to thousands of dollars a month if you will need graphics, accessibility maintenance, copywriting and general update services provided for you.

The biggest factor is frequency and intensity of the updates to your website. Updating regularly provides a big bonus in search performance. If you or someone on your team is committed to and trained to make updates, you can reduce your out-of-pocket post-launch costs but don’t forget that your time has a price tag, too.

A retained services agreement of at least a year’s duration should include hosting, managing updates for security and platform improvements, assisting with a couple of hours a month of support and/or update time.

These post-launch agreements are generally between $200 – $500/month but save you a lot of frustration by allowing skilled professionals to quickly and accurately do the job. Almost every one of our clients has a retained services agreement with us.

We have a 60-day cancellation clause and never hold websites hostage if someone needs to make a change. We should all be comfortable in the deals we make.

Request a call through our Contact Us page, providing as much detail as you’d like including the address of your current website. Or, you can call Chris Shirer directly at (614) 246-7770.