My question is, do you think this is a fair price to be charged for this service.
The devil is in the detail, and I'm sure you would say something similar if someone here was asking about an accountancy quote and listed very briefly what was being offered by a potential supplier.
For instance, 9 pages of content might sound good, but it is no good if it has just been copied from someone else's website, it could land you in trouble facing a copyright infringement lawsuit.
I have seen his portfolio and to me it looks ok.
That's a good start in any due diligence buyer beware process, but it also worth contacting some similar clients in that portfolio, to see if they are happy with the service, not just in the first year but in subsequent years too.
With websites I would also say that not all that glitters is gold, so don't just go by visuals or a screenshot in a portfolio, have a look at how the websites load and run, and how they perform in google searches.
suppliers of specilialist accountants websites as well, that provide content and newsletters etc? Some will come in at very close to your £500.
This is definitely an option, but it is worth checking whether other accountants in your area are using the same service, since you might end up with near identical websites.
These accountancy specific sites with ready-made content might also suffer from duplicate content penalties on google, which might mean that you have little chance of ranking well in google even for local searches. My
accountant client looked into but decided against these accountant specific web services because they wanted their site to be different from other accountant's sites in their area, and avoiding these services certainly helped them with their targeted google rankings (currently 1st for accountant northampton, 3rd for accountants northampton, etc).
But there are plenty of accountants who use these specialist accountant website services, perhaps these accountants are established businesses who aren't too worried about getting new clients via google, perhaps they get their clients in other non-internet marketing ways or via adwords.
There are also quite a few accountants who use the free website builder service from
Microsoft Office Live, you can see some of them on google via this
google search. (for anyone thinking about office live, I recommend buying a .co.uk domain from an established registrar like 123-reg, then pointing its nameserver at office live)
